


That's My Weakness Now

by RosalindBeatrice



Category: Actor RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: 1920s, 1927, F/M, Golden Age Hollywood, Slow Burn, Steamboat Bill, silent films
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:23:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 56,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27672667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosalindBeatrice/pseuds/RosalindBeatrice
Summary: Halfway through 1927, things are starting to go south for Buster. In the meantime, Nelly, an amateur theater actress, is after her big break.
Relationships: Buster Keaton/Original Character(s)
Comments: 127
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you like pictures with your words, find this story on Tumblr here: https://busterkeatonfanfic.tumblr.com/
> 
> Stick around: Things get romantic in Chapter 13, naughty in Chapter 16, and extra naughty in Chapter 17.

They called it a prop shop, but in truth it was a warehouse. Newly built, the rough-hewn pine shelves smelling of Christmas trees, it was already stuffed to the gills with goods of every kind, shape, and size imaginable. It was as if, Nelly thought, someone had upended the entire contents of Marshall Field’s into the place. Clothing racks held miles of costumes, separated by sexes. Shelves in the same chamber as the costumes were filled floor to ceiling with hat boxes. Another door led to an open floor that seemed to be the size of a football field where furniture that had been delivered by truck and train stood in neat rows. Other rooms held baby buggies, oil lamps, vases and ceramics galore, bedclothes, books, barrels, china sets, coffee grinders, cuckoo clocks with tangled chains. And though there was enough stuff for at least seventy-five families of four to comfortably set up house, Buster apparently wanted more.

When she thought back to the Vista’s prop room, stuffed with paper mâché masks, costumes increasingly moth-eaten with every month, and beaten-up props, and little larger than a closet, she felt dizzy.

The prop master, Bert, seemed not to notice her overawe and she was grateful. When she’d arrived in Sacramento two mornings prior and been told by the Chamber of Commerce that she was late and all 1800 slots for extras had long since been filled, despair had threatened to overtake her. She’d already let a room in a house on 22nd street, fibbing to the young married couple who owned it by saying she had a part in the film. She’d spent the afternoon of the 19th and the 20th haunting the edges of River Junction, that strange half-city out of Reconstruction America, looking for someone who could give her a job. Man after man laughed her down. Most were just hired help themselves. “You and all the other damn dames,” they’d say, shaking their heads. 

She hadn’t been anywhere near ready to declare defeat, but running into Bert was nonetheless the lucky break she needed. She’d spied him getting into one of the fancy cars that lined a lot outside the larger-than-life set and asked for a chance, any chance, to be part of the picture.

“Well,” he’d said with the doubting half-smile she’d recognized from the other men’s faces, “we do need some help right now in the prop shop. We could use someone to help with the books.”

Beaming, she’d declared it was just the opportunity she’d been looking for and when could she start. Breaking into pictures was what she intended to do and if this was the path forward, so be it.

As Bert gave her the tour of her new environs, she learned that she was expected to help choose props for sets and, more importantly, manage the inventory. Each prop that went out into a set had to be returned, so each one that was on a set had to be noted. Bert would handle the broader picture stuff, the hired men the props, and she would be in charge of the small, boring details. She was thrilled to be in charge of small, boring details.

If the scale of the prop shop was jaw-dropping, it was still nothing compared to the size of the city. There weren’t words for the size of the city. Gargantuan didn’t do it. Humongous was a little closer to the mark, but still not right. She’d expected the sound stages you saw in magazines, not whole entire buildings, not full-sized steamboats of the type she’d only glimpsed in books, not paved streets lined with cars. Most of the buildings were just optical illusions, their fronts fully fledged and their backsides unfinished. This fact did nothing to make the city less impressive when she considered that almost none of it had existed three weeks ago. She knew from the magazines, of course, the huge money Buster had spent to make _The General_ historically acceptable, so perhaps she shouldn’t have been as surprised as she was.

Still. It was one thing to read that there was big money in pictures. It was another to see it up close for yourself. It was quite another still to know that you were going to be a cog in this giant piece of machinery.

It was thrilling, it was daunting, she was pretty sure she was the luckiest girl in the world. There were so many people to watch, too. Workmen, gag men, and beautiful young girls, none of whom, she quickly was told, were the leading lady. Their only job was to stand in the background and look gorgeous. It honestly relieved her that she’d wound up in the prop shop. She wasn’t so modest that didn’t know she was easy on the eyes, but her looks seemed positively average in comparison. Clearly there was work to be done before she made her screen debut.

“Are you clear on it all?” Bert said.

“Sure I am,” she said, feeling not the least bit clear. 

For the rest of the day, she sat at a kind of workbench in the prop shop going through a list of businesses like Hale Bros., Inc. and the John Breuner Company and ringing them to see if they could ship her a mysterious array of things, including a ventriloquist’s dummy and an escritoire. She had a delightful time imagining how the various and sundry props might be used for laughs and what they could possibly have to do with steamboats.

She didn’t actually see the star of the picture that day or even the next, but it didn’t matter. As she rode her bicycle back to the room on 22nd Street, exhausted but proud, she felt that she had finally arrived.

Buster didn’t remember her name, which meant that she wouldn’t be a steady.

It bothered him.

Not that he didn’t remember her name, not that it wouldn’t be an affair to remember, but it bothered him that it no longer bothered him that he couldn’t remember her name. It pricked him so much that after he got up to take a leak and pour himself a glass of water, he moved to the opposite side of the bed from her. Slightly more awake than he had been just two minutes ago, he fished for her name. No luck. It slithered trout-like out of his grasp.

Call it an instinct, a hunch, a premonition, but he knew he was in for rough waters ahead. Not a week went by that the papers didn’t mention talkies. The Villa had made Nat happy, but not nearly as happy as he’d hoped. It all added up to trouble on the horizon. Even though he’d always known that what goes up must come down, he didn’t have it in him to be cheerful about it. 

Just before he went back to sleep, he closed the gap between him and his paramour on the bed, deciding to sleep next to her after all. He laid a hand on her naked bosom as he drifted off. This season of Bacchanalia would come to an end, one way or the other, probably sooner rather than later. May as well enjoy it while he still could. 


	2. Chapter 2

Nelly couldn’t have been happier as she rode across the I-Street bridge on her bicycle the morning of the 23rd, bathed in the orange glow of the early morning light with a cool breeze running through her hair. She arrived on set at a quarter to seven, fifteen minutes ahead of the start of her shift, but better early than late. She left her bicycle in the lot with the cars and walked down to River Junction. 

The city was more ghostly than it had been the previous day. There were no extras yet, just crew smoking cigarettes and laughing among each other. She realized she was almost the only girl in sight. A tall blonde man leaning against one of the facades winked at her as she passed by and she smiled back.

It turned out to be a hectic, busy morning. Workmen, directed by Bert, carried out various pieces of furniture, including several full-sized barber’s chairs, and she jotted it all down in her ledger and ran back and forth fetching smaller props. By the time eleven o’clock rolled around, she was starved. She took lunch in the canteen at one of the long tables amidst the female extras that the company had brought with them and who’d introduced themselves yesterday and waved her over to sit with them. Today she said her greetings and sat back to listen to their gossip over some cold chicken and peaches. She expected to hear all about the picture, but mostly the girls just talked about the sundry men they were involved with or wanted to be involved with. Buster was a hot topic. Nelly was shocked to hear some of the girls discussing how to seduce him. 

“Seduce?” one said, laughing. “All you have to do is walk into his dressing room and offer yourself.”

The remark sent the other women flying into giggles. “That’s right,” another said, with a wink. There was another peal of laughter, so loud that several men at the other tables turned to look at them. Nelly grinned so she wouldn’t stick out, but inside she was horrified. She wasn’t an innocent, that wasn’t it. She’d had her fair share of dalliances with steady boyfriends, no big deal. She supposed it was the casual way the women talked about it, as if he weren’t a married father. She’d heard plenty of rumors about Hollywood of course, most of them sordid, but somehow she’d never stopped to consider that Buster Keaton, with his elegant wife and beautiful young sons, might be in their center. No one who was rational could really believe that he was the shy, hesitant lover he appeared to be on screen, and yet she guessed she’d bought into fiction without fully realizing it.

She still hadn’t seen him in the flesh yet; she had to mind the shop while Bert supervised the furnishing of sets and seldom left it except to relieve herself or take lunch. By the time she’d left the prop shop the past three days, the star of the picture had been long gone. She was curious to see him, but in no hurry. There were still at least three more weeks of filming and she had more than enough to keep her happy and interested. Already she loved sitting at her workbench going over the books while the radio played quietly nearby or taking inventory at the end of the day, drinking in the marvelous array of props.

Anyway, to speak of Buster as a conquest felt wrong. She finished her cold chicken and excused herself. She ran into Bert halfway back to the prop house. He was carrying a large floor lamp and kept bumping the shade into the side of his head as he walked. “Could you find Buster and ask him where he wants those barber’s chairs? We’re setting up right now and God forbid I ask Reisner over him.”

“Buster?” she said, stomach somersaulting. 

“Yes, Buster.” The corner of his mouth twitched and he shook his head slightly as if he couldn’t believe her astonishment. “If you’re going to be in pictures, you’d better get over the starstruck thing quick. It’s all business here.”

She blushed. “Where is he?”

“Dressing room I imagine. Make it quick, filming starts in thirty.”

She didn’t actually know where the dressing rooms were, but spied the blonde man who’d winked at her earlier heading toward the prop shop as she headed away. “Excuse me. Can you point me to the dressing rooms?” she said. For one instant, she considered asking him to go ask Buster about the chairs for her, but realized how it might look to Bert if he found out she couldn’t take directions. Now that she had this job, nothing was going to get in the way of it. 

The man smiled and his eyes crinkled at the corners. They were striking and blue. She realized that he was very good-looking up close. “What do you want to know that for?” he said teasingly. 

“I’ve got to ask Buster about some barber’s chairs. Bert told me to.” She felt herself go red under his gaze. 

“Just off in that direction. See that building on the left there? They’re in there.”

She thanked him and turned to go.

“Hey,” he called after her. “What’s your name?”

“Nelly,” she said.

“Nelly, I’m Tommy.”

“Okay Tommy,” she said, smiling. “Thank you. It was nice meeting you.”

“See you around,” he said with a wink. 

The building that housed the dressing rooms was fairly empty, but she did find a man who could tell her which dressing room was Buster’s. It was larger than the others and set at a remove from them. Block letters on the door read simply ‘Keaton.’ With her heart in her throat, she tapped on the door.

“Come in,” said a voice. 

She was momentarily stunned as she put her hand on the doorknob. The Great Frozen Face spoke! His voice was of middling deepness with a kind of East Coast edge to it. He sounded nothing so much as completely ordinary. 

He was alone when she entered the room, sitting at a small table with a drink next to him and a notepad open in front of him. He’d been writing when she interrupted. 

The sight of him tied her tongue. To start with, she didn’t expect him to be in costume. He was wearing the most absurd outfit she’d ever seen in her life, and she’d been to the circus almost more times than she could count. He had on a loud, diamond-checkered jumper vest, a striped velvet jacket, a polka-dot bow tie, and plus fours so oversized they almost entirely concealed his shoes. Topping off the outfit was a fake moustache glued under his nose, following the curve of his upper lip. His face was made up in greasepaint and powder, his lips painted scarlet and eyes lined in kohl. The only word for what she felt was awestruck. 

“Can I help you?” he said, looking at her. He seemed oblivious to the way he looked. 

She swallowed, but her knees felt weak and she couldn’t remember what she’d come into his dressing room for. Some question Bert had wanted her to ask. What was it? All she could seem to think was that she, a little old nobody from Evanston, was meeting Buster Keaton, a movie star. How many times had she seen him and films and here he was, right here, a real-life person? Her mind staggered with the enormity of it.

“Oh, I see,” he said, after the silence had dragged on for a few moments. He straightened up and put his palms on his thighs. “You want to be in pictures and you’re asking me for a break, but I’ve made you tongue-tied.” He nodded, as if she’d answered the question instead of him. “Sure, that’s what it is.”

She felt faint. The pounding of her heart in her own ears almost crowded out his words. Was it that easy? Was getting a break really this easy? It wasn’t why she had come here, but if he was offering …

She couldn’t seem to summon any words. 

“Look, I’ll put it straight to you,” said Buster, sounding resigned. 

She couldn’t get used to his voice.

“You’re too tall,” he said. “You need to get rid of about twenty pounds, give or take. And you’ll want to do something about your bosom. It’s too big. It’s not in fashion.”

There was a roar in her ears as she struggled to process what she had just heard. She felt as though he’d just poured a bucket of ice water down the back of her dress.

He must have noticed what the expression on her face meant, because his mouth quirked sympathetically. “I’m not trying to be unkind, I think it’s just better you hear it now so you know what you’re up against. Girls are a dime a dozen in this biz and they’re expected to have a certain look, you know?”

She had never felt so humiliated in her whole life. Of course she  _ did _ want to be in pictures, but that wasn’t why she’d come here. Not at all. He was wrong. If only she could speak, maybe she could sort out the misunderstanding.

“That’s not why I’m here,” she finally said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. 

“Oh?” he cocked his head, appearing unaware that he’d just made a fool out of her. Realization appeared to dawn and his features relaxed a little. “Oh. If it’s that, it’s got to be quick. And I can’t undress all of the way, I’m supposed to be on set in twenty.” His hands went to his belt. 

To say she was mortified was a deep understatement. She wished she’d never bumped into Bert and been told to come here. She shook her head. All she could choke out before she fled was, “I’ve got to go.”

She left the building in a daze, hands shaking. He thought she was propositioning him!

She managed to make it back to the prop house without swooning. When she was safely back at the workbench, it came to her. The stupid barber’s chairs, that’s what it was all about. Before she had time to properly compose herself, Bert walked out of the next room. 

“Nelly, you’re white as a sheet. Something the matter?” he said.

She shook her head quickly. As far as she was concerned, her humiliating encounter with Buster would go to the grave with her. “I don’t think my lunch agreed with me,” she said. 

“Well what did Buster say about the chairs?”

“He said—” Her mind went back to the way he’d begun unbuckling his pants and she couldn’t find a lie to patch the gap in her words fast enough. 

“You did find him, right?”

She nodded, unable to meet Bert’s eyes. 

“Ah,” Bert said, patting her shoulder. “Starstruck, right? That’s okay, happens to a lot of first-timers. I should have tried to introduce you before this.”

There was another man making assumptions about her actions, but this time she welcomed it. She nodded. 

“Don’t worry about it. It probably won’t take us too long to set the chairs up. They’re heavy suckers, though.”

He disappeared, leaving her alone. Her thoughts went back to lunch in the canteen.  _ All you have to do is walk into his dressing room _ . Maybe she was more of an innocent than she’d thought, because not once between that overheard conversation and standing in front of Buster had she considered what it meant to show up all by herself in his dressing room. In hindsight, her mistake was obvious. She cursed herself. 

It was impossible to keep her mind on the books the rest of the day. Like a ghastly film, the scene in the dressing room played through her mind on a loop. The previous three days, she would have worked long into the night if Bert had let her. This time, when six o’clock rolled around she couldn’t get off the set fast enough. She was far from happy anymore as she bicycled back to 22nd street across the I-Street bridge. 


	3. Chapter 3

The third glass of whiskey at lunch was a miscalculation. He felt a little too unsteady on his feet as he walked into the barber shop set and they weren’t filming any pratfalls today, so he couldn’t play it off as that. He put an extra stick of chewing gum in his mouth just in case the first stick and brushing his teeth hadn’t concealed the smell of the drink on his breath, and tried to keep his gait steady. At least he’d be sitting for most of this scene.

Reisner was fussing over the props with the workmen, telling them some sign wasn’t straight. “Buster, where do you want these?” said Bert, gesturing to the barber chairs where he and his girl were destined to reunite. “Do you want them farther apart than this? Closer? Or what?”

Buster shrugged and sat down in one of the chairs. “They look fine to me. Maybe a little closer.”

“I mean, are the cameras going to have enough room?”

“Bert, they’re fine,” he said. “Move them a little closer together if you want. You know I trust you.”

Bert nodded and wrestled the other chair forward a few inches. As he wrestled, he said offhandedly, “You sure scared Nelly, didn’t you?”

Buster had no idea what he was talking about. “Nelly?”

“The prop girl, Nelly.”

“I’m not following.” Behind him and to the side, men bustled lighting into place. 

“The new girl I’ve got in the prop house. I sent her to ask you about the chairs. She looked like a ghost when she came back.”

A second ticked by, then another. Then another. He still wasn’t—

Realization landed like an oversized prop anvil. “Ah, hell.” 

“What?” said Bert.

“That was your prop girl?”

“Yes. What did you say to her to make her look so white?” Bert gave him a knowing look. 

“Nothing!” Buster said. He’d been acting and ad-libbing his whole life and he wasn’t about to stop now. “She got a little tongue-tied and I filled in the blanks. Thought she was coming to ask for her big break in the movies, you know how they corner me about that stuff. I must have embarrassed her, I guess.”

Blame that third glass of whiskey. It had made him dopey and loose, thrown off his judgment. There was a feeling in his stomach right now that he didn’t like, a sizzling sense of shame. It was a feeling that hung around too often these days in one form or another and he was getting sick of it. It wasn’t his fault. Nine times out of ten when there was a woman under the age of forty in his dressing room, she was already naked or willing to be. The other times, it was the age-old hard-luck story about needing a break. He’d had perfect reason to assume both motives. It wasn’t his fault.

The shame niggled.  _ Oh yes it was _ .

He tried not to dwell on the fact that he’d insulted the girl’s looks on top of it all. In truth, there was nothing wrong with them. She looked fine, just not suited to pictures was all. With the whiskey freeing his tongue, he’d thought nothing of answering honestly. Now the terrible coarseness of his remarks was apparent.

The shame went on niggling him until the cameras began rolling and he lost himself where he always lost himself, facing down the cameras with a stone face. 

  
  


By the time she’d gone to bed, Nelly’s humiliation had invited a friend along: anger. She knew that men were frequently cruel, licentious, and crude, but she’d never thought in a million years that Buster Keaton could be counted amongst them. All of it was a damnable lie, the wife and the children and the sophisticated parties, and most of all the sweet trepidatious Buster of the films. He wasn’t Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik or John Barrymore’s Don Juan, not her favorite character or star in other words, but she’d always found him charming; what girl didn’t? She had to wonder—were they all like this? Did Valentino have a nightly habit of robbing women of their virtue? Did Barrymore delight in dressing down girls until they felt about as small and as low as a bug? 

She rolled onto her side fitfully, fuming. It now seemed like a mistake to come to California. Perhaps it was just better to turn tail and go back to Evanston rather than spend another day in the employment of a man who had belittled her ambitions and her looks before she had a chance to get a word in edgewise. She could maybe work herself up to a couple starring roles in local productions, retire at the height of her career, marry, and host garden parties and luncheons for the Women’s Auxiliary Club just like her mother and aunts. Of course, the thought wasn’t a serious one. She was being paid a handsome twelve dollars a day, far more than she’d ever earned as a part-time governess in Evanston. She’d swallow her pride, finish out the picture, and use the experience as entrance into another picture, maybe not a laugh feature next time.

She let a fantasy of John Barrymore rock her off to sleep. Although she’d never seen him in  _ Hamlet _ , she’d clipped a picture from the production from a magazine and glued it into her scrapbook: dark clothing, brooding brow, those strong hands that could clutch a girl and make her swoon. After  _ Steamboat  _ wrapped up, she’d return south to Hollywood and finagle her way onto the United Artists lot, where she would be cast as Katherine to Barrymore’s Petruchio in  _ Taming of the Shrew _ . The last thought in her mind before she drifted off was of Barrymore’s big hands tearing the blankets off of Kate as she lay in bed, declaring them unfit for such a woman as his wife.

The memory of what he’d said to the prop girl bit at Buster like a flea all the next morning. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, his traitorous mind would wander to the incident and he’d be reminded unpleasantly of what a low thing he’d done. He stuck to one whiskey at lunch, even though he would have preferred a second. He tried calling Nate at the Villa, thinking that hearing her voice might provide some kind of consolation. The phone just rang and rang, until finally Edwin picked up and told him she was with Dutch.

At last, his conscience pricked him so much he left his dressing room early. He peeked in the canteen and cheers of “Buster!” erupted from the extras and the crew. He gave them a wave of acknowledgment and left. The girl wasn’t there. He exited and headed toward the prop house. Feeling slightly shy in addition to remorseful, he swung open the door when he got there. The prop girl didn’t notice him over the sound of the radio. She had her back turned to him at the workbench and was crunching an apple and reading a book.

“Hello,” he said. 

“Jesus Christ!” she said, nearly startling out of her skin and whipping her head around. 

Her swearing made him feel better. In his experience girls who swore could take care of themselves, which meant that maybe he hadn’t crushed her underfoot like a flimsy petunia blossom.

She blanched when she realized who it was. “Oh. Mr. Keaton,” she said. An expression resembling dislike settled on her face. 

He couldn’t blame her. He crossed the room and swung himself onto the workbench, dangling his legs. “I insulted you yesterday,” he said, studying her face. Despite the dainty little mouth she’d drawn on with lipstick, she couldn’t hide the fact that her lips were full. Her brown hair was done up in earphones in a faux bob. She reminded him a little of Evelyn Nesbit. Now that he had a good look at her, without the glaze of whiskey, he doubly regretted what he’d said about her looks. 

She stared straight ahead, expressionless, the apple forgotten in her hand. She still seemed a little nervous around him, but there was a set to her jaw that told him he was not going to be forgiven easily.

“There’s baseball practice tonight at seven. You’re invited,” he tried.

She finally met his eyes. “I have plans.”

“Okay,” he said, conceding. “You’re angry with me. I get it. Look, I was out of line yesterday. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for opening my big fat mouth. I was way out of line.”

She merely looked at him. 

“I acted disgracefully. There’s nothing wrong with your looks. I never should have said anything, I never should have—” He couldn’t bring himself to mention that he assumed she’d also been looking for sex. “I’ve been out of sorts lately and, look, I won’t start making excuses. It was wrong, plain and simple. I made assumptions and I shouldn’t have. What’s your name? Nelly?” he said, pressing. He wasn’t going to let up until that flea he called his conscience stopped biting.

“Nelly,” she confirmed in a flat voice. 

“Let me make it up to you, Nelly. Do you want to be an extra today? I’ll ask Bert to give you the afternoon off.”   
  
He could almost see her internal struggle. She set her half-eaten apple on the workbench and folded her hands in her lap. “I don’t want any favors,” she said, staring ahead.

She was a proud one. It should have annoyed him, but he found himself admiring her stubbornness. Anyway, he had a lot of practice in Natalie cracking tough nuts. He hopped off the workbench and sank to one knee, propping supplicating hands on her knee. “Please?”

She drew in her lips and he could tell she was trying not to smile. Ah, sweet victory. 

For his pièce de résistance, he broke into song. “ _ I can hear the robins singing, Nellie Dean. Sweetest recollections ringing, Nellie Dean _ .”

Nelly succumbed to the smile. “Alright,” she said, shaking her head and trying to hide it. 

“Good,” he said, getting to his feet. He crossed the room and poked his head into the area where all the costumes were stored. Although the film was ostensibly set fifty years ago, all of the women’s costumes were of the latest fashion. He thumbed through the rack and pulled out a few dresses halfway before selecting a pink sleeveless one embroidered with burgundy flowers. “Wear this,” he said, walking back into the main room and handing it to her.

She looked surprised. “Are you sure?” Her eyes told him she still didn’t trust him. 

“Of course I’m sure. Go dress and I’ll walk you to the set.”

Looking now as though she especially didn’t trust him, she nonetheless went into the costume room and closed the door behind her. She came out less than a minute later. She looked just fine—maybe not like a leading lady—but just fine. The shame nipped him again and he scratched it off, reminding himself that he was making it up to her. 

“Sure you don’t want something nicer for the shoot?” he said, noticing that she was wearing flat brown Oxfords.

“Oh, they’re fine. I don’t suppose the cameras will be anywhere near my feet.”

When he stepped closer to her, it clicked; she was a couple inches shorter than she’d been yesterday. He’d made her embarrassed of her height and she switched shoes. It was another reminder of how rotten his words had been. No taller than he was, she was certainly not a giant. He even had an inch on her, give or take. 

“Do I need to put on more makeup?” she said. 

He shook his head. “No, you don’t need to wear any if you’re in the background. We have to do it to stick out,” he said, indicating his powdered cheeks. 

“Alright then.”

“Hold on a minute.” He ripped a piece of paper from a steno pad on the workbench and wrote,  _ Stealing Nelly for the afternoon. Will return her in a timely fashion. -Buster.  _ He set the half-eaten apple on top of it for a paperweight and offered his arm to Nelly. She just stared at it and then at him. “I’ll walk you to the set,” he explained.

She continued to look unsure as she accepted it, but his conscience felt much lighter as they left the prop house together. 

  
  


The bright lights agreed with Nelly. They probably wouldn’t have appeared particularly bright to any proper budding starlet, but that Buster had made her an extra for a day, that she would actually be  _ on film _ and tens of thousands of people would see her, was exactly what she’d been hoping for when she’d taken a train from Evanston to West Hollywood to Sacramento. 

It turned out that being an extra involved a lot of standing around waiting for direction while the cameras tracked the exploits of the main characters, namely Buster and his mouse-sized co-star Marion, whom everyone called Peanuts. The scene was about missed connections; Buster, encountering his girl on the street, tries to apologize to her. She ducks in and out of the telegraph office, debating whether to accept, then follows after him as he trudges away from her.

Peanuts needed the benefit of multiple takes. Buster was flawless, Nelly thought, in every one. Her role was to be one of the town inhabitants walking down the sidewalk. It was hot in the early afternoon sun and she was grateful that Buster had picked out a sleeveless dress for her. She tried to act casual while strolling back and forth and not get distracted by the action further down the sidewalk where Buster and Peanuts were.

After the scene had wrapped, the director and Buster moved onto the next one: Buster walks dejectedly up the street and a car whizzes his carpetbag out of his hands and onto its running board. She and the other extras gathered in a small crowd facing the car to watch. Behind the scenes like this, she began to see how the gags were accomplished. For this one, the camera tracked Buster on the left. When the car came into frame, it obscured most of his body. Because of this, the audience couldn’t see one of the actors in the car pluck the carpetbag from Buster’s hand in one fluid movement, which left him bag-free and bewildered after the car had passed. The hand-off was invisible. This scene took only a couple takes. Buster was all business in between, telling the other actors and the director in a serious way what he thought the scene should look like. It was all so fascinating to finally be on the inside and see the nuts and bolts. She watched carefully, trying to commit it to memory. 

For the next scene, the carpet bag was meant to tumble off the running board and trip up Buster, who was running at top speed after the car. It took around three or four takes for the bag to fall satisfactorily into Buster’s path. Each time it did, he would somehow tumble head over heels to miss it. The first time he accomplished the stunt, the extras hooted and broke into clapping. Buster flashed a quick smile, clearly pleased, and Nelly joined in the applause. No matter how many times he vaulted over the bag, going briefly vertical, she couldn’t tell how he did it. After that, it was back to the sidewalk for her even though she was too far in the distance, she thought, for the cameras to see her at this point.

After some time had gone by, Buster announced that it was a wrap. So that was that. She looked around at a couple of the other extras for guidance, wondering what came next. The logical thing to do would be to return the dress and finish out the rest of the day in the prop house, so she decided just to slip away rather than reveal herself as a rookie by asking. As she turned at the corner near the facade of the Western Union Telegraph building to take a shortcut, the sound of hurried footsteps made her look over her shoulder. It was Buster. The extras turned to look at them as Buster came to a stop. Nelly felt herself pale a little as she faced him. For all her bravery in the prop house earlier, she was still far from used to him.

“Coming to practice tonight?” he said, a little out of breath. 

She was surprised. She’d assumed that the invitation earlier had been flippant. “I can’t,” she said, before she had time to think about it. She had a hard time reading the answering expression on his face, but she thought it was puzzlement. “I have plans.”

However thrilling being an extra had been, part of her had not forgiven him. When she’d stepped back and looked at her torso in her bureau mirror that morning, all she could think about was his comment about her bosom being too big and her needing to lose twenty pounds. The words still felt like salt in a bleeding gash, even if he clearly did wish to make it up to her. Anyway, she wasn’t fibbing about having plans. She’d agreed to play blackjack with Joe and Maggie, the owners of the house on 22nd Street, that night. 

“Well, alright then,” Buster said, with a nod. “I’ll see you around.”

“Sure,” she said, feeling an upwelling of all sorts of emotions: regret at turning him down, pride at her own resolve, anxiety that he might decide to can her if she continued to rebuff him. “Thank you for letting me be part of the picture.”

“No problem.”

She nodded at him and they parted. 

The worst of the confused feelings had faded by eight that evening when she was at the leather-top folding table with Joe and Maggie in their sitting room, regaling them with stories from the day. By now, they knew that she was employed in the prop shop and not as an extra, so the fact that she really had been an extra that afternoon was of the utmost interest to both. She went over every detail, keeping back, of course, yesterday’s ignominious encounter with the picture’s star. As the conversation waned and they settled into the game of blackjack, she felt positively luminous. Not even Mary Pickford, she thought, could feel as famous as she did tonight. 


	4. Chapter 4

The band in the Senator’s ballroom was playing a slow dirge-like version of “In the Good Old Summertime” and Buster had half a mind to kick the lead singer in the seat of the pants so he’d shut up. The head of the Chamber of Commerce was there, the mayor too, and he was pretty sure he’d met a few of the eponymous senators. He’d glad-handed for as long as he could stand it (about an hour) before slinking off into a protective circle of familiar faces. He used his stature to his advantage, concealing himself behind the screen that Joe, Fred, Sandy Roth, and other members of the company made. There was plenty to talk about; namely, the picture. And also, the picture. But now he was bored of talking about the picture and this positive funeral march that they were playing wasn’t helping matters. Although Sacramento was rumored to be open, the hotel was pretending tonight that it was dry and he regretted leaving his flask in his room, but they were feting Buster after all and it would have been rude not to be fully present for every single excruciating second.

Still.

“Think they’ll notice if their esteemed guest goes AWOL?” he said to Fred. 

Fred laughed. “Count on it.”

Buster pulled his packet of cigarettes out of his slacks pocket, pinched one out, struck a match, and lit it. He didn’t like crowds of people he didn’t know or being expected to care about Sacramento’s economic situation, whether Coolidge was to be president again, and what was to be done about the decline of morals in young people. He especially didn’t like airs and this crowd had plenty. The truth was, he’d been made to do very few things in his charmed life, fewer still as he’d become a bona fide star, and his tolerance for formalities was at an all-time low. They were much more Nate’s speed. With her at his side at these functions, he never had to do more than answer the usual stupid questions (“Do you ever smile?”; “Do your pratfalls hurt?”) before Nate filled the uncomfortable silence with gay chatter and put the questioner at their ease.

Unlike with  _ The General _ , however, Natalie had expressed no desire to be on location during the filming of  _ Steamboat _ . He liked to think it was because she couldn’t bear to be away from her magnificent Villa for very long, but he had a sneaking suspicion her absence had simply to do with the fact that she didn’t care to be around him any longer.

“At least one more hour,” Joe said. “Then you can go back to your room and cut loose if that’s what you want.”

Behind Sandy, Buster spotted a man and his wife encroaching. 

“Excuse me,” said the man, tapping Sandy on the shoulder. “My wife’s an awful big fan of Mr. Keaton and I was just wondering if we could introduce ourselves for a minute.”

Taking a deep drag from the cigarette and blowing the smoke out in such a way that it temporarily obscured his face, Buster looked at the woman and said, “I never smile and the pratfalls don’t hurt.” 

She looked shocked. “How did you know what I was going to say?”

“Hi.”

Nelly startled just as badly as she had when Buster had crept up on her a few days prior. She knew the voice wasn’t his, though, even before she looked over her shoulder and found herself locking eyes with Tommy, the blonde-haired workman. 

“Hi yourself,” she said, turning around and smoothing down the skirt of her dress. She’d been going through a jumble of skeleton keys in one of the smaller rooms in the prop house. 

Tommy was extraordinarily tall, almost sequoia-sized. He leaned against shelves. “How’d you like to go to a blind tiger tonight?” he said, without preamble. “A few of the fellows and I are going. We invited Mr. Bert. Oh, and Buster too.”

Buster, she thought, accustomed as he was to rubbing elbows with the upper crust, was not going to attend this rustic soirée, but she didn’t want to puncture Tommy’s evident pride at the scheme. She had never been to a blind pig, a blind tiger, a blind anything. She and some girlfriends would pass around hooch some Saturday nights back in Evanston, but she’d never actually drunk alcohol in an establishment. So naturally she said, “What time?”

Tommy grinned. “Oh, we were thinking maybe seven o’clock or something.”

She knew that Sacramento wasn’t as dry as other cities, but she paused to consider whether this was such a good idea nonetheless. A brief flash of the place being raided by police and her getting carted off to jail and losing her gig on the film occurred. The sybaritic part of her threw the doubts aside. Her decision was only strengthened by Bert, who came through the prop house doors.

“This jackass bothering you?” he teased, craning his head to look up at Tommy. 

“I invited her to the party tonight,” Tommy said. 

“What makes you think she’d go with the likes of you? She has taste, y’know,” said Bert. 

“What makes you think I have taste?” Nelly said, making both men laugh. When the laughter died away, she said, “Sure. Where?”

Tommy told her it was on 2nd Avenue next to a Chinese laundry. By day, it masqueraded as a five- and ten-cent store. “One of the bricks is painted a sort of yellow,” he said. “Just the one, though. There’s a side door off the alley. Knock four times.”

It all sounded so alluring and mysterious that Nelly couldn’t wait. 

A quarter past the appointed hour, Joe dropped her off in front of the store. She expected it to have a dingy air, but it looked perfectly clean and presentable, not at all the sort of place that would draw attention. Joe waited for her as she crept into the alley, feeling her heart race with the illicitness of it all and the promise of seeing Tommy again. She gave three rhythmic knocks. A man in a tweed cap whom she vaguely recognized opened the door and she waved to Joe to let him know it was okay to drive off before she stepped into the tiger’s den. 

There were slightly more than a dozen men crowded into the place, which was an apartment at the back of the store consisting of one main room, a water closet, and a couple doors that appeared to belong to bedrooms or closets. Everything from the stove to the sofa was in the main room. An old gramophone in the corner played ragtime jazz. She knew at once that Buster would not be coming. The set-up and the company were far too humble and she wondered if she’d made an error in judgement showing up. She was the only girl in sight and overdressed in nylon stockings and her best black dress with the belt. She felt ill at ease until she saw Bert and Tommy. Bert was in conversation with one of the men who was frequently in and out of the prop house. Tommy was standing near a bar, behind which stood various libations. 

“Nelly!” he cried, striding toward her. His eyes crinkled and he looked ecstatic to see her. “C’mon, come pick your poison.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the bar. Bottles lining the shelves behind it contained liquors of light ambers, deep browns, and clear silvers. There were even bottles of beer, not near beer, but real beer. She’d never seen so much booze in her life. She selected a bottle of beer. Tommy didn’t take his arm away immediately. It was heavy and he smelled good, woollen and mannish. She tilted the bottle back to her lips, feeling as though she was in good hands. It didn’t take long before she was warm and happy. 

Tommy conversed with the other men about the week’s events on the set—one man had nearly lost a finger sawing a board, another had given himself a good electric shock from a wire—and talked a good deal about a poker game he had recently won $100 in. She and Bert spoke for a while, mostly about work and what they expected shooting to look like next week. When her beer bottle was empty, Tommy slid a generous glass of bourbon into her hand. It stung going down in a way she didn’t quite care for, but as she got warmer still, she became used to it. About an hour or so into the party, Tommy’s hand crept around her waist and she didn’t mind a single bit. He talked to her about his childhood in Indiana and how he’d trap raccoons for fur to bring in money for the family. With his height and looks, she figured he was trying to break into pictures too, but it transpired that he thought he’d make his real fortune as a high-stakes poker player. The ambition seemed a little silly, but she wasn’t one to trod on other people’s dreams.

“Let’s dance,” he said, bending down to yell it in her ear over the conversation. The man who was in charge of the gramophone put on a song of medium speed in which a guitar plunked quietly in the background and a clarinet and trumpet took turns in the foreground. They danced in a small circle around the room and she had to crane her neck when he talked. 

They were three songs in when a workman in his fifties approached. He was missing several bottom front teeth. “Here.” He pushed a small glass of something clear in her hands.

“What is it?” she said, laughing.

“Gin.”

“I’ve never had gin before,” she said.

“Never had gin before?” Tommy said, holding her at arm’s length in mock incredulity.

She giggled and shook her head, trying to keep the glass steady as he pulled her back under her shoulder. She sipped and there was that sting again, this time tasting like Christmas trees. 

“No, you don’t sip it,” said the workman. “You swallow it down all at once.”

He and Tommy watched as she gamely tilted the drink to her lips and disappeared the gin down in one gulp. She gasped, wrinkling her nose as they laughed uproariously. “That was awful!”

“Try this one,” said another workman, younger and heavier. He extended a rocks glass containing a chestnut brown liquor. “Whiskey.”

She sipped and contorted her face. This was the worst one yet. “I’ll take my time,” she promised, setting it on a nearby table.

It didn’t take long before she was warmer and looser and gayer than she’d ever felt. Tommy passed her into the arms of the toothless workman. To her surprise, he was an incredible dancer and they did a foxtrot around the room to the next song, winning the applause of the other men. Bert took the next dance and they attempted a tango, but the music wasn’t the right tempo and they couldn’t stay in step. She was having the time of her life. She reached for the whiskey and barely noticed the sting as it went down. 

Tommy took her back and someone put “Steamboat Bill” on the Victrola, which caused everyone to erupt into laughter.

_ Oh, Steamboat Bill, steaming down the Mississippi. _

_ Steamboat Bill, a mighty man was he. _

_ Steamboat Bill, steaming down the Mississippi. _

_ Going to beat the record of the Robert E. Lee! _

She grinned, hot and breathless. Tommy’s big hand on her waist was beginning to feel more and more exhilarating. She began to entertain thoughts of asking him to slip out into the alley with her, but whenever a song ended, another workman was waiting with a drink or a request for a dance. At some point, the fat workman stole her away from Tommy and tried the Turkey Trot with her, but her feet were no longer cooperating. She was thirsty, but the only thing available to quench her thirst was beer.

She became dimly aware that her head and limbs had turned clumsy and heavy and she had completely lost track of time. It didn’t worry her. She was young and could dance and drink all night if she wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes. The published word count is about 8400 words right now, but I'm already up to 28,400. That is, I promise the story is going somewhere, but it's proving to be a slow burn. Spoiler alert: There is a kiss around Chapter 11 or 12. (I have to fill in a few gaps, which is why I'm not quite sure which chapter it will be.) The story rating will likely also be changed to Explicit at some point. So please, stick with me! 
> 
> I could also be persuaded to publish the next chapter early if you tell another Buster fan you know and ask them to leave a kudos and a comment. I know, absolutely shameless of me, but feedback keeps me going forward.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Reference to nonconsensual sexual situation, but nothing explicit. 
> 
> As a reminder, if you like images and other media, check out the Tumblr version of this story! https://www.tumblr.com/blog/busterkeatonfanfic

Buster was feeling withdrawn and almost didn’t show. He’d settled on a night working out a few more gags for the flood scenes and reading a few more chapters of _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ , but he was restless. The gags didn’t seem right, his attention kept wandering from the pages of the book. By his third glass of whiskey, an adventure sounded like just the thing he needed to cure the jitters. After all, he reasoned, it would mean a lot to Bert and the hired guys if he put in an appearance, even if it was just for an hour. At around half past nine, he put on his jacket and went down to the Senator’s lobby to have the valet bring the Duesenberg.

Sure enough, the speak-easy was right where they said it was, near the corner of 2nd Avenue and 33rd Street next to a Chinese laundry.

There was no need to knock on the old wooden door midway up the alley. The laughter was loud enough that he could hear the party from out here. He opened the door and let himself in. Everyone was in such a state, it made him look sober. No one noticed him and he was considering a flip-flap to get their attention when a woman’s laughter rang out among all the masculine voices, turning his head.  
  
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, quite clearly.

She was standing near the door of a darkened room and the tall blonde workman had her by the elbow. He seemed to be trying to coax her into it where at least two other men waited. Several others ringed the doorway of the room. Something about it didn’t feel right. No one else in the place seemed to notice that anything was amiss; they were caught up in conversation and card games.

“C’mon, we’ll take good care of you,” the blonde man said.

The girl planted her feet, still smiling, but Buster could see she didn’t want to go. 

“C’mon, show us your striptease!” said another man, to a peal of laughter from the group. 

Her smile faded.

Anger crackled in Buster and he started across the room. “What’s going on here?” he said. Only when he’d reached them did he notice the girl was Nelly, the one who worked in the prop house. 

“Buster!” the men all cried, throwing up their hands and smiling like it was just a big game. The tall blonde man didn’t join in, but instead let his arm fall from Nelly’s elbow and gave Buster a contemptuous look, although he immediately followed it up with an innocent smile. “Just having some fun with Nelly, is all,” he said.

“Like hell you are,” said Buster, and the smiles disappeared.  
  
“Buster,” said Nelly, looking discomfited and very, very drunk. 

“You’re coming with me.” He took her elbow and she stumbled forward, and only then did he realize how bad of shape she was in. She could barely stand up straight.

“Where’re we going?” she said, and he caught her around the waist with both hands as she lost her footing. “Ouch,” she said, trying to look at her right ankle.

“I’m taking you home,” he said, glancing back at the men. The smart ones had sense enough to look abashed. A couple were glowering, including the blonde guy. With three whiskeys under his belt, he had more than half a mind to clean the bastard’s clock. 

“Oh,” Nelly said, as she regained her balance. “You don’t have to do that, Bert was going to give me a ride.”

“No, we’re going now. Just where is Bert anyway?” said Buster, realizing he hadn’t seen him. 

She shrugged. “Oh, my bag!” she said. “I can’t forget my handbag!”

“Where’s your bag?”

“Behind the bar.”  
  
“You stay here, I’ll get it.” 

When he had retrieved the little beaded purse and passed it to her, he took her elbow and guided her out the door. She smelled extremely boozy. “How much have you had to drink?” he said, as he led her carefully down the alley and to the street. 

“Not nearly enough,” she said. “Gosh, my ankle hurts.”

“Be serious.” He opened the passenger door of the Duesenberg and helped boost her into the seat. 

“This is the nicest car I’ve ever been in,” she said, looking around in a kind of glazed wonder. “But I _am_ going to answer your question and that answer is, I am not entirely sure. I think eight drinks, maybe. I had a glass of whiskey and gin. I had some bourbon, too, and some beer. I feel splendid.”

“Hands in the car, I’m closing the door,” he said. He made his way around the front of the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat. “How do you really feel?”

“As gay as a feather,” she said, with a drunk giggle. 

“I mean, can you see straight? Is everything spinning?” 

“Mmm,” she said thoughtfully, squinting. “Not too badly.”

“If you’re going to be sick, you must tell me, okay? The car is new.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to upchuck in your fancy car. I’ve got better breeding than that.” She patted his arm and said, “I’m hot. Is it too warm? Are you warm as well?”

Any other time, he might have found the situation amusing, but the image of the blonde man trying to persuade her into that room had overpowered any funniness for him. 

“You could have lost your virtue back there,” he said seriously. 

“Oh, I lost that a long time ago. It’s no big thing. I wouldn’t be telling you this under normal circumstances, but what’s to be done? I’m very drunk you see.” She turned her palms up apologetically.

“I’m not talking about you being willing. Those guys had every intention of—”

“—Buster, I’m not a virgin.”

He took his hands off the steering wheel, unaware he’d been gripping it, and spun toward her in a sudden temper. “Yes, I heard you the first time. You aren’t taking this seriously. They meant to rape you. Can I put it any plainer?”

Nelly went quiet. “I’m sorry,” she said softly after a few moments, seeming to grasp even in her state what he’d saved her from.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, looking away from her, “but if I’d have been ten minutes later, who knows what they may have done.”

Nelly sank down in the seat. “I had too much to drink.”

He reached across the seat to squeeze her upper arm. “You’re not the first girl and you won’t be the last. Now, where do you live?”

“22nd Street. I rent a room there,” she said. She began to unbuckle one of her shoes.

“Address?” he said. He took the car key out of his slacks and put it in the ignition. 

“1922, I think. The year _Ulysses_ was published.”

“You think or you’re sure?” he said, turning his head toward her again.

She removed her shoe and sank further down the seat, giving him an apologetic look. “I’m not sure now. It could be 2219. If you take me there I’ll be able to pick it out.”

He wasn’t fond of the idea of driving up and down dark streets waiting for her to choose a house and perhaps choosing wrongly, so he made a decision. “You’re going to sober up some before I take you home.”

Nelly looked uncertain, but she seemed to accept it and made no reply. 

“And tell me if you’re going to be sick. I can pull over.”

“I’m fine,” she said, as he turned the key and headed down 2nd Avenue toward Broadway.

It wasn’t the adventure he had been after, but he supposed saving a damsel in distress counted for something. Nellie removed her other shoe and rubbed her ankle. “Would you care if I put down the window?” she said. “I’m so hot.”

“Knock yourself out.”

She rolled it and put her hand out into the night air. To Buster, who had never taken off his jacket, the temperature felt plenty cool. He considered, turning down Broadway, how he was going to look walking into the lobby of the Senator with a girl who couldn’t see straight and taking her up to his room, but he was just going to have to chance it. 

A peculiar movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention and he looked over. “What are you doing?” he said. Nelly had pulled the skirt of her dress halfway up her thighs and was wrestling with the garter clips of her girdle. 

She gave him a guilty look. “I’m hot.”

“Please don’t take off all your clothes. I don’t want a scandal,” he said, only half-joking as he envisioned the lurid headline (‘Dame Caught without a Stitch in Buster Keaton’s Duesenberg’) and Natalie’s hysterical reaction. He thought fleetingly of Virginia Rappe, who would strip any time she had a few drinks in her.

“I’m not, just my stockings,” said Nelly, sounding embarrassed. “They’re suffocating me.”

He turned his eyes back on the road and rubbed his forehead. “Okay, carry on.” 

She continued bustling in his peripheral vision and eventually succeeded in rolling down the offending stockings. “It was a mistake to wear these,” she mumbled. 

He decided not to answer. He was already thinking ahead to the hotel room. He’d get some coffee and food into her, wait around while she recuperated, then take her straight home. He was forced to look over again when she thrust her hand out the window, gripping her stocking and making it trail in the breeze like a wind sock. “Goodbye,” she said, releasing it.

“Good God, why have you done that?” he said.

“It was a mistake and I’m getting rid of my mistakes.” She dangled the second stocking out of the window for a moment before letting it go, humming to herself under her breath. Fortunately, they were at the Senator in less than ten minutes before his mixture of annoyed and amused tipped further toward annoyed.

“I’m going to let her sober up and then take her back home,” he couldn’t help but say to the valet as he got out of the front seat. 

Nelly, to his dismay, chimed in as he helped her out of the car. “He rescued me and I am indebted.”

He put his arm around her waist and helped her into the hotel, she in bare feet with her shoes in one hand and purse in the other. He was relieved to see that the lobby was mostly empty. He made a beeline for the elevator and ignored the attendant manning it. Nelly hummed and looked around, and the attendant gamely pretended she didn’t exist. Blessedly, the coast was clear as Buster took her to his room and unlocked the door. By now, it was approaching ten-thirty. He deposited her on a settee in the salon and rang down for some toast and coffee for two.

“Is there a lavatory here?” said Nelly, when he’d hung up. 

He assisted her to it, warning her not to pass out or hit her head because he wouldn’t be coming in to rescue her. His luck held out when she emerged without a scrape. Back in the salon, she stretched out on the light blue velvet sofa with the high back and massaged her ankle. “Okay, the room is spinning now.”  
  
Without a word, he set a wastebasket at her feet. “Use that if you need to.” The whole encounter had sobered him up; he didn’t feel the whiskey anymore and poured himself a glass so he could relax. As he sipped, he looked at Nelly. There were two types of drunk girls in his experience, lewd and ridiculous. Nelly was a classic case of the latter. She sat up slightly with her bare knees bent and began reaching into her hair. She pulled out one pin, then another. He watched as tendril after thick tendril tumbled to her shoulders.  
  
“Why do you wear your hair long?” he asked.

She smiled. In the light, he could see her mascara was smudged and her eyes had that slightly faraway look of every person three sheets to the wind. “I know, it’s terribly out of fashion, isn’t it?”

He sipped. “I didn’t say that.”

For a moment, she appeared and sounded perfectly sober. “It was my one concession to my mother. She hates the idea of me being an actress and she really hated that I came to California. Before I left, she made me promise that I would never bob my hair. Like Jo March, it’s my one beauty.”

He was about to tell her that wasn’t true, but a knock came on the door. He set the glass of whiskey down and commandeered the tea cart from a reluctant staff member, who wanted to wheel it inside for him. He didn’t care for the man to catch sight of Nelly and her bare legs.

“Do you take sugar or cream?” he asked Nelly, after he’d taken the cart to the sofa. By now, over half of her hair was down, brown and thick and wavy and glossy. He found himself staring and had the blind thought that he was grateful her mother talked her out of bobbing it. 

“Cream, please,” she said, still busy with her hair. “Thank you.” She took the cup from him and folded her legs up, pulling her skirt down over her knees. 

“So you want to be an actress?” He took off his jacket and laid it on the back of the chair, and picked up his whiskey again. 

She gave him a smile that almost looked sad as she sipped the coffee. Her glazed eyes considered him. “That’s the idea. I guess I’ve got a few pounds to get rid of, though. Probably shouldn’t eat that toast.”

He tried not to grimace. “Nelly, if I could take back what I said last week, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You don’t need to lose a single pound and if you _don’t_ eat some toast, I’ll dump you out the window right now.”

“You hurt my feelings that day,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I’ve tried not to let it bother me, but I suppose I’m only human.”

He did the only thing he could think of. He stood up, took the coffee out of her hand, set it down, hooked one arm under her knee and the other beneath her back, and lifted her bodily from the sofa. She shrieked in surprise.

“Buster, what are you doing?” she said, kicking her ankles and squealing.

“I am demonstrating to you that you are not heavy is what I’m doing,” he said, looking sternly into her face. “And I won’t set you down until you agree to eat something.”

Nelly gave up and went still. “This is ridiculous,” she said, glaring up at him.

“You’re right,” he said, frowning down at her.

They scowled at each other for a moment or two before the absurdity of the situation struck them at the same time and they broke into laughter. 

“Please,” Nelly said, laughing, “set me down please.”

“Promise you’ll have at least two slices of toast.”

“Promise.”

He lowered her back to the sofa. “Good. Raspberry jam or marmalade?”

“Just butter, please.” 

He buttered two slices and passed them over to her on a plate. She bit into one obligingly and looked at him. He went back to his whiskey. 

After she’d finished one slice of toast, she said, “You have a dimple in your right cheek when you smile.”

He pretended not to have heard her. “You want to be an actress?” he said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. 

“Doesn’t everyone?” she said, starting on the second piece of toast. She yawned. 

“I don’t want to be an actress.”

“Haha,” she said dryly, setting the plate aside after one bite. 

“What do you see yourself doing? As an actress.” The whiskey had begun to warm up his blood and he was beginning to like the repartee.

“You really want to know what my dream is?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“I asked, didn’t I?” 

“Even if you’re just feigning a polite interest, I’ll tell you,” she said. Her hands went back up to the top of her head and another tendril of hair fell to her shoulders. “When I lived in Evanston, that’s where I’m from, I acted at the Vista—that’s our theater—mostly in revues, but I always liked Shakespeare best. I think talkies will change the way they film Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s hardly Shakespeare without the words, you know? That’s what I’ve always thought. You could film in all the places he talks about too, Scotland and Verona.”

He nodded. “So where do you come in? Lady Macbeth or Juliet?”

She shook her head and more tendrils fell. She was almost done unpinning her hair. “Neither. My dream is to play Kate in _The Taming of the Shrew_.”

He couldn’t remember what that one was about, but didn’t say so. “Who’s the leading man?” He half-expected her to say him.

“John Barrymore, if you must know,” she said. As she unfastened another tress, spots of color appeared on her cheeks.

“Hmm,” he said. “Jack? I’d forget about him, he’s a woman-hater.” 

Hair all the way freed, Nelly hid her face as she shook it out. “You seem to like trampling my dreams.” She tossed her head back and gathered the curtain of hair over one shoulder with two hands, twisting it.

Buster felt a strange kind of way. Not jealous, that wasn’t quite it, but some kind of way he couldn’t put his finger on. “Trust me on this one. I’m doing you a favor. He drinks like a fish, too.”

“So do you,” she fired back, and he was at a momentary loss for words. He wouldn’t say ‘like a fish,’ but he had been at the bottle more than usual these past few months. He didn’t see how she could have known that though, having met him all of three times.

“Eat the rest of your toast,” he said, changing the subject. 

She stuck her tongue out at him, but had another bite. He watched her collect the bobby pins into one hand. She stood up somewhat unsteadily and placed them on the tea cart. “Safekeeping,” she mumbled.

He set the whiskey aside. “How are you feeling now?”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “I don’t suppose more coffee will help with the spinning? I’m starting to feel like I’m on a carnival ride.”

He had a sudden vision of her hurling on the leather seats of the Duesenberg and said, “Why don’t you sleep it off for a couple hours? You can take the bed and I’ll just stay up for now. I was in the middle of a book anyway.”

She looked ready to argue, but a jaw-splitting yawn interrupted her. “Only if I’m not imposing,” she said, after it had passed. Her eyes looked unfocused. 

“You’re not imposing,” he said. He knew a girl on the edge of collapse when he saw one. He stood up and offered his arm, and led her into the bedroom. The awkward question of what she would wear to bed was solved when she crawled underneath the blankets, dress and all. 

“G‘night, Buster,” she said, closing her eyes. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

After he left the bedroom, the memory of what he’d seen at the speak-easy replayed in his head. Jack Barrymore wasn’t the only woman-hater in pictures. The business was crawling with men, both bigwigs and lowlifes, ready to defile a girl at a moment’s notice. In fairness, it was also crawling with women willing to be defiled in order to get where they wanted to be, but Nelly, not a virgin but not a lewd drunk either, didn’t seem like one. He hoped that she took care of herself wherever she ended up.

Pretty soon his own eyes grew heavy. The idea of waking Nelly and lugging her down to the lobby, waiting for the car to be brought, then driving her all the way home did not sound in the least bit attractive, not to mention the danger of her being sick all over in the car. He pushed the tea cart into the hall so it could be collected and found a spare blanket in the wardrobe. With a wary eye on the sleeping figure in his bed, he took off his shirt and slacks, plucked a pillow from beside her, and settled into the cramped confines of the bedroom sofa. He was asleep before he knew it, dreaming that Peanuts had drowned during the flood sequence and that the papers were calling for him to be hanged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edward McPherson tells us about Buster's Rolls-Royces and Packards, but not what he was driving in 1927. Buster gets a Duesenberg, therefore.


	6. Chapter 6

Nelly staggered out of bed. It wasn’t her bed, but that was the least of her worries. She was going to be sick. She moaned, stumbling to the floor. Beneath her hands, a red carpet with a zigzag pattern swirled and pitched.

“No you don’t, no you don’t!” someone called from across the room. She was grabbed under the armpits and dragged into a bathroom as the horrible flip-floppy feeling that preceded throwing up rose in her throat. She had just enough time to make it onto her knees in front of the toilet before she vomited. As she clutched the edges of the seat and heaved, the someone held her hair back. She had no memory of unpinning it. 

“Am I dying?” she said, after her stomach had stopped lurching. She felt as though she might faint. The room spun and she was drenched in a cold sweat. The sight of what she’d just thrown up in the toilet bowl made her retch again, but nothing came up.

“No.” A hand at the base of her skull continued gripping her hair. She now knew, although she couldn't remember how, that the hand belonged to Buster. Her feeling of illness was so acute, however, that she had no will left to worry about what he thought of her. She leaned back and he let go of her hair. He pulled the chain on the water tank and vanished the frightful contents of her stomach. A sink ran. 

“Here, drink a little water.” He nudged a glass into her hand. 

She swallowed a few mouthfuls and set it down. “Feel cold,” she said, teeth chattering. In front of her, the toilet swam. She tried to make it focus, but it wouldn’t stay still. 

“Here.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon. Why don’t you try to stand up?”

She shook her head. “I feel like I’m going to faint.”

“Okay, put your head between your knees then. Take deep breaths.” He knelt, pushed her feet slightly apart with his hands, and pressed on the back of her neck, urging her head down. “Breathe, alright? Deep breaths.”

Even with her eyes closed and her head bent, everything was pitching like she was on the high seas. “Cold,” she reminded him.

“Shh, take it easy.”

His hand was warm on her neck and she shivered. She had no idea where she was or what had happened, but she didn’t care. She felt so sick, all she could think about was how horrible she felt and whether she’d ever escape the sensation. After a minute or two, the hand disappeared. Moments later, a heavy down bedspread flumped on top of her. Buster pulled it off her head and tucked it around her shoulders. It was so big, it seemed to fill up half of the bathroom. She scooted over to a deep clawfoot tub to the right of the toilet and leaned against it. For the first time, she caught a good look at her companion. He was knelt on his haunches in front of her in nothing but a white undershirt and shorts, his hair rumpled, and he looked concerned.   
  
“Where are we?” she managed.

“My hotel room,” he said, without explanation. 

She had no energy to ask for one and she didn’t care about the answer, anyway. The warmth of the bedspread felt good. Gradually, the pitching lessened and her teeth stopped chattering. Sleep began to creep over her. “Can I have a pillow?” she said. 

“No, you’ll feel even worse in the morning if you sleep here. C’mere. I’ll walk you back to bed.”

She still felt nauseated when she stood, though not as bad as before. Mostly, she was so tired she felt like a steamroller had run her over. She couldn’t keep her eyes open all the way. Buster gripped her around the waist, blanket and all, and slowly walked her out of the bathroom. “Easy,” he said. “Easy.” There was a large, high bed in the next room missing its bedspread and she shuffled toward it like an invalid with his guidance. 

“Here.” He removed the bedspread from her shoulders and tossed it to the foot of the bed. She sat on the edge of the too-high bed and he grabbed her calves and swung her legs up onto it. She was no longer wearing her stockings, she realized, but still had on the belted black dress. Before she could protest, Buster had pulled the sheets up to her shoulders and tucked the bedspread around her. “Comfy?” he said.

“Mmm-hmm.” Her eyes closed and she immediately began to fall asleep. 

“One more drink of water,” said Buster, rousing her. When she groaned, he said, “You’ll thank me in the morning.”

She drank half the glass and that was apparently enough to satisfy him. Whatever sane sliver of her brain that still remained wondered if they had slept together. She expected him to get in bed next to her, but sleep dragged her under before she could find out if he did.

The alarm clock woke Buster at 5:30. He briefly considered throwing it out the window like so many comedians in so many bad shorts. Why in the hell he’d passed up that vacation for the pleasure of doing another picture, he didn’t know. He had a whiskey headache and a sore neck courtesy the sofa. His height didn’t give him any advantage with this particular one, which was small and not intended to be slept on. Rolling his head on his shoulders and rubbing his neck, he walked over to the bed where Nelly was sleeping, the alarm having made no impression on her. She’d kicked off the bedspread and was lying face down with the sheets twisted around her. He put three fingers lightly in the center of her back just to make sure she was still breathing. She was. 

He went into the bathroom, pulled off his underclothes, and stood in the ribcage of the shower, letting it steam off the worst of the headache. He expected Nelly to be awake when he came out in a towel with his teeth brushed and hair combed, but she hadn’t moved. He gathered his clothes, deciding it was safe to dress in the bedroom. Sure enough, she still hadn’t moved by the time he was dressed. He went over to her again and put his fingers on her. Still breathing.

He stared at her a moment more, running his thumb back and forth over the tips of his fingers, then went to the salon adjoining the bedroom where he picked up the telephone and ordered breakfast and a newspaper. As he sipped coffee and forked up bites of wheat cakes, the  _ Sacramento Bee _ told him that $100,000 alone was going to be paid in salaries for the Sacramento shooting of  _ Steamboat _ . He scoffed, knowing that Harry would be even more of a pain in the neck if he read it.

At 6:30, there was nothing left to do but to head out to River Junction. He stepped back into the bedroom one last time to retrieve his jacket and shoes, and glanced at the bed. Nelly had moved onto her back, but was still fast asleep. He had no intention of waking her and ordering her to work; it was best for her to sleep it off. Bert could just manage without her for the day. He slipped the Do Not Disturb sign onto the doorknob of the suite before he left. 

The first thing he did when he walked onto the set—knowing that it wouldn’t stop eating at him until he did—was order Bert to gather all the hired men who’d been at the speak-easy. When all fourteen of them were assembled before him at the entrance of the prop shop, he let them have it. “Which one of you had the bright idea to get Nelly so drunk last night she couldn’t tell left from right?”

“Who?” one wise guy had the guts to ask.   
  
“You know damn well who,” he said. “The girl who works here. The only girl from the picture in that place last night.”

None of the men spoke. He hadn’t expected them to. The blonde one who’d been the ringleader of it all was staring at him sullenly. The memory of what he’d been trying to do made Buster’s blood boil. He itched to pummel him, but that would mean trouble. With Brand on his case, trouble was the last thing he needed.    
  
“If I ever catch any of you trying to pull a thing like that with a girl who works here or any girl who doesn’t for that matter, I’ll fire you and make sure you never have a job in California again if it’s the last thing I do. Understand?” 

There were murmurs and downcast eyes. So much for being tough guys. He let his words hang in the air a little longer, then jerked his head, dismissing them. “Don’t forget it.”

As the blonde man passed him, he said, “You, over here.” The blonde man stopped in front of him. “You  _ are  _ fired,” Buster said.

“Huh?” the guy said, looking shocked.

“You heard me. I wasn’t born yesterday, I saw you fooling around with her. I know exactly what you were up to. I want you off of this set right now. Get your things and get packing.” 

The guy looked one hundred percent livid and Buster found himself wishing for a fight. Let him try it; he would be in for a rude awakening. He could actually see the guy weighing it, sizing him up. But all he did before he stalked out was spit, “Fuck your picture anyway, Keaton.”

When he’d gone, Buster rounded on Bert. “And what the hell were you thinking? You were there, weren’t you? Why weren’t you keeping an eye on her?”

Bert mumbled something about needing some air. 

“No, you left her there. You went home. I didn’t see you out front and you weren’t in the alley. You dirty dog, you actually left her there with all those roughnecks.”

Bert protested that Tommy had agreed to take her home.

“Tommy? The blonde fellow? I think you and I both know what he was planning on doing to her, and he had some friends along the ride,” he said. Bert wasn’t getting off the hook that easy.    
  
Bert acknowledged that, yes, they did know what the men had planned on doing to her.    
  
“Well you keep an eye on her then, okay? Make sure none of those horses’ asses are coming in here giving her a hard time. And see to it you’re ready for the game tonight.”

He spent the rest of the morning on the Colusa wearing his sailor suit and filming gags in a make-believe world where men and women were largely innocents and nothing could hurt them, not even floods. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second scene takes place on 30 July, 1927.


	7. Chapter 7

When Nelly opened her eyes, she couldn’t remember what day it was, what time it was, or most of all where she was. The bed sheets smelled like a man.   
  
_ Buster _ . She sat straight up, hardly noticing the clanging in her head.

She scrambled to the edge of the bed and tried to tear off the sheets that were twisted around her middle. She saw as she swung her legs over the side of the bed that her dress and girdle had ridden up around her waist, but she was still wearing her cami knickers. Whatever had occurred last night had not apparently involved their disposal. 

A wave of nausea and dizziness seized her before she was able to stand up. Her head ached so badly that she ran her hands over it, suspecting that she’d fallen and hit it. The exterior was intact, but the interior … It was in agony. Her very brains felt hot and swollen. 

“Hello?” she said. The suite seemed empty, but she couldn’t be sure. “Hello?”

When no answer came, she reached for the half-full glass of water on the nightstand and drained it. She had a raging thirst and scanned for the bathroom so she could fill the glass again and relieve herself. She had to pee like a racehorse. She got up and was forced to hobble on her way to the en-suite. Her misadventures had led to one thing at least: a twisted ankle. She remembered a phonograph and a rolicking jazz tune that made her feel the lightest and gayest and youngest she’d ever felt in her life. She remembered Tommy now, how good-looking he’d been. She remembered dancing for what seemed like hours. She was in such a good mood that she’d even danced with the men who weren’t handsome. She groaned at the memory of the other men as she relieved herself.

There was water in the round basin at the bottom of the skeletal shower and the bathroom felt slightly humid. A towel hanging on the bar confirmed that Buster had come and gone.

At least she thought it was Buster. That part she remembered too. Vomiting her guts out and Buster Keaton squatting opposite her in his white undergarments … doing what? It was fuzzy. She vaguely recalled a desire for a pillow, but he must not have given one to her because she woke up in the bed. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten from the blind tiger to the hotel room. She tried and failed. It was a big black spot, a blight on a reel of film. Buster had not been at the blind tiger as far as she remembered. 

At the sink, she drank four glasses of water total, then rinsed her sour mouth. Her face was pale and haggard in the mirror. She looked about twenty years older. Suddenly, her heart hammered at an alarming thought. It wasn’t Sunday, it was Saturday. What had made her think it was Sunday? They were filming today! She was hours late. 

Her eyes scanned around the bedroom for a clock. She spotted one on the mantel and rushed to it. A quarter to noon. 

“Damn!” 

She ran into the adjoining salon, hoping to at least find her handbag. She did, half-spilled on one of the seemingly dozens of ornate chairs that dotted the room. The handbag held no powder or rouge, but at least it had lipstick and her tin of mascara. She dashed back to the bathroom to apply it. Her hair was another story. There was no hairbrush in the handbag, just a small backcomb that was impotent against the rat’s nest of tangles confronting her. She was out of bobby pins. Her dress was wrinkled and covered in lint, not to mention that she stank of sweat and stale booze. She would have to go back to 22nd Street unless she wanted to get fired on the spot for improper dress. Also, her stockings were nowhere to be found. She looked on the chairs in the salon, underneath the bed, on the mantel, and in the sheets and bedspread. Nothing. She even peeked, blushing, in Buster’s closet and his bureau drawers. She did find a sterling silver men’s hairbrush on the bureau. She also discovered a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and washed down four capsules without a second thought. 

As she considered the sterling silver hairbrush, she felt guilty. It was expensive and she didn’t want to get it clotted up with her long hair. Promising herself she’d use her own comb to clean it afterwards, she sat on the bed trying to get the tangles out. The hairbrush smelled like Brilliantine. It seemed important not to be seen wandering the halls of the prestigious Hotel Senator with the unbrushed hair of one of Macbeth’s witches. Maybe she could call and have some bobby pins brought up—but that would alert hotel staff to the fact that there was a Girl in Buster’s Room. From her first encounter with him in his dressing room, it was clear that he had dalliances, but she wasn’t sure how discreet they were. For all she knew, an enterprising maid might sell a story to the papers for some extra money at the first opportunity. She brushed her hair and tried not to think of how terrible her head felt. 

Her situation went from bad to worse when a doorknob rattled in the salon. Of course. The staff tidied the suite every day. She considered hiding under the bed, but it was too late. From her position, she watched an arm come through the door, shortly followed by a leg, shortly followed by Buster himself. 

Of all the things she might have expected to come out of his mouth when he saw her, it wasn’t, “You’re awake.”

Before she had a chance to do much other than stammer a response, he was in the bedroom. He took off his jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, saying, “How do you feel? Feel like eating?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling rather weak and desperate. 

“I’ll order sandwiches and coffee. You look like you could use some coffee.”

As soon as he’d exited the room, she frantically pulled the strands of her hair out of his brush and padded to the bureau to return it. Job accomplished, she sat on the sofa rather than the bed, noticing for the first time that there was a rumpled sheet draped over the back and a pillow lying on one end. From them, she deduced that she had run Buster out of his own bed. 

“Relax,” said Buster, appearing in the doorway and startling her. 

“Am I fired?” she said, looking over at him. 

He looked surprised. “Fired?” A half-smile played on his lips as he realized what she was driving at. “Oh, for being young and silly and frivolous? No.”

“I  _ am _ terribly sorry for last night,” she said soberly. “I kicked you out of your bed and you—when I threw up, you—”

He waved her off. “Don’t worry about it.” As if he’d peered into her mind that very second, he added, “Nothing happened between us, don’t worry about that either. Why’s your hair look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Brushed on only the one side.”

“I don’t have a hairbrush.”

He squinted, clearly confused. “How’d you get half of it brushed then?”

She flushed what she could only assume was a violent red. “I borrowed your yours.”

“But you only brushed half?”

She was going to die of mortification right here in Buster Keaton’s hotel room. That’s how she was going to go, rest in peace Nelly Foster. “I didn’t want you to know I’d used it, when you came in just now. I hadn’t asked permission.”

He cocked an eyebrow. He strode over to the bureau, then to her, and dropped the hairbrush in her lap. “All yours,” he said. 

“Thank you. Do you think,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “you could have some bobby pins brought up?”

“Sure. Need anything else?”

She shook her head. “I’m just going to go back to my room to change before I head over to the set.”

He sat on the foot of the bed. “You’re not going to the set today, you’re going to rest. How far away is your room?”

She thought. “A mile, a mile-and-a-half? 1911 22nd Street. I didn’t mention it last night?” 

Buster grinned. Nelly had seen him smile, but never up close and never with full teeth. His teeth were very straight on top and he had a dimple in his right cheek. She was keenly aware in that moment of how extraordinary it was that she had ended up in the bedroom of Buster Keaton’s hotel suite, never mind that her methods were nothing short of disgraceful.

“You mentioned a lot last night, but I couldn’t get that address out of you to save my life.”

“Oh no,” she said, her stomach sinking. She shielded her face with her hand.

“You’re a lot of fun.” He stood up and squeezed her shoulder on his way out of the room. “I’m going to call for those bobby pins.”

As he used the telephone, she hastily brushed out the rest of the tangles, swiped her hair from the bristles, and set the brush on the nightstand next to the bottle of aspirin. Pretty soon there was a knock at the hotel door and she ducked into the bathroom, partly to relieve herself again, mostly to hide from whoever was delivering lunch. She looked in the mirror, tried for a moment to make her hair and her face more presentable, but gave up. The lipstick and mascara would have to do. She also gave her teeth a hasty brush with a finger and Buster’s toothpaste.

Feeling shy, she stepped into the salon where a silver tray sat on a cart. “Sit down,” said Buster. He handed her a small plate that held a chicken sandwich. “There’s soup here too. Something asparagus, I think.”

Nelly took a bite of the sandwich and found that she was ravenous. The sandwich gave her an excuse not to talk. As she ate, she considered how she would politely remove herself from Buster’s company and sneak away before he changed his mind about not canning her. Her bare legs made her self-conscious and she tucked them under her on the chair as she ate. The silence didn’t seem to bother Buster. He dipped his sandwich in his soup and ate, glancing at her once and awhile.

“I can’t find my stockings,” she said, after she’d finished her sandwich. “Do you know where I put them?”

“You threw them out the window.”

“I what?” she said, not sure she’d heard right. 

“Of my car.” Buster blinked without expression, the famous frozen face she knew so well from pictures.

She was bewildered. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were hot,” he said, with a small shrug. “By the way, I noticed the ankle.” He gestured. “You should ice it when you get back to your room.”

“I don’t remember turning it,” she confessed. 

“What do you remember?” he said, his eyes probing hers.

She told him about drinking and dancing in the blind tiger. She also told him about the gap in her memory between dancing and winding up on his bathroom floor. “I am really, terribly sorry about that,” she said again. More of the incident had come back to her and she remembered how he’d dragged her into the bathroom and held her hair back as she vomited. 

He waved her off. “I’ve seen worse. I want to talk to you about something serious for a moment, though.”

A hot-cold rush of dread ran through her insides at his words, but she kept her hands steady on her cup of coffee and tried to make her face cool and calm. 

Buster finished the rest of a second sandwich, dabbed at his lips with a napkin, and put the plate on the bottom of the cart. “You know that tall man, the one with the blonde hair?” He paused, looking at her.

“Tommy,” she said. Why she should feel so guilty about Tommy, she didn’t know, but under Buster’s gaze she somehow learned that consorting with him was a horrible mistake.

“Is that his name? Well anyway, I’ve fired him. If he ever comes around again to bother you, come straight to me.”

She must have looked as puzzled as she felt, because he went on. 

“When I walked into that speak-easy last night, they were trying to get you into a room with them. A whole gang of them, and he was the ringleader.”

She was horrified beyond words. Tears filmed her eyes, but she blinked them back. On top of the spectacle she’d made of herself the previous night, she was not going to cry in front of him. “I don’t remember that at all,” she said, her voice feeling weak.

“I know you don’t.” He reached over and laid a hand on her knee for a moment. “They got you as drunk as possible for that very reason. Just be careful from now on, okay? Take a few girlfriends when you go out.” He withdrew his hand. “Here.” He took a red box out of his pocket and handed it to her. It was decorated in violets and labeled INVISIBLE HAIR PINS. “Do your hair up and I’ll drop you by your room before I go back to the set.”

Back in the bathroom with Buster’s brush, she saw she no longer needed rouge. Her cheeks were in a high flush now, partly from the effects of last night’s imbibing, partly from their conversation. There was no crimping iron to be found, so she made do with a hasty chignon, patting down the flyaways with Buster’s Brilliantine afterwards.

“Ready?” he said, when she returned to the salon.

She felt hot and ashamed walking through the halls of the Senator and down the stairs next to him, but he didn’t seem to care if they were spotted together. She kept her eyes on her feet as much as possible. Even though they hadn’t slept together, no one in the hotel knew that. No one in the hotel knew either that she’d almost been raped by a gang of men last night, but all the same it felt like she was wearing a scarlet letter. 

They waited in silence outside the grand hotel doors for the valet to bring Buster’s car around. He didn’t seem to have anything to say and she was too mortified to make small talk. When the green Duesenberger rolled up and the valet exited, Buster held open the passenger door for her. She assumed it must have been the car she’d ridden in last night, but her only memory of it was from the parking lot in River Junction. She sat beside Buster in silence as he took a right on J Street. When they had come to Joe and Maggie’s house, he went around to the door and helped her down from the car.

“Don't look so glum,” he said, before he let go of her hand. “Everything’s okay. And ice that ankle as soon as you get in, hear?”


	8. Chapter 8

Buster woke the following morning feeling like hell. His nostrils were so stuffy he could barely breathe out of them, his nose was on fire, and his mouth still tasted like blood even though he’d brushed his teeth twice before bed. He stumbled to the bathroom to look at the damage. Two small purple bruises underscored his eyes and the bridge of his nose was swollen to twice its size. His appearance confirmed that canceling filming had been the right decision. He swallowed some aspirin, cleaned his teeth again, and took a shower, letting the steam open his clogged sinuses. 

The aspirin barely touched the pain. He toweled off and pulled on a dressing gown, then poured himself a breakfast whiskey to go with the steak and eggs he ordered. Once he’d eaten, he called Nate. To his relief, he was patched over to her line; she hadn’t left for Sunday brunch at Dutch’s yet. 

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, how are you?” he said.

She told him that she was well. 

He said, “I broke my nose in the game last night.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. How?”

He explained the eighth-inning fastball to the face. “But we won the game. 9 to 6.”

“Did you?” she said. “That’s too bad about your nose though. I’m sorry, darling.”

She sounded suitably sympathetic, but he craved more. He wanted the soothing, the I’ll-be-right-there, the kissing and canoodling. 

“How are the boys?” he said.

“The usual,” she said. “Full of the devil.”

“Good,” he said. “I won’t be filming for a few days because of my nose. You should really consider bringing them up. They’d love the steamboats and I’d like you to see the set. They say the shopping is good in Yolo, too.”

“Oh Buster,” she said, her tone telling him the answer was already a big fat no. “You know I’d love to, but six hours on a train is too much for them, don’t you think? I know you’re disappointed, but we must think of what’s best for them. And wouldn’t they be in your way? I’d have to bring Connie to mind them, and I think four is getting to be a crowd. I don’t suppose your suite would hold another four, would it?”

“Nate, you don’t have to bring the governess. I think you’re perfectly capable of managing them for a few days, don’t you? We can get a second suite or even a third, if that’s what has you concerned.”

“I’m flattered by your faith in me,” she said with a little laugh, “but you’ve never traveled with three- and five-year-old boys! I know I’m letting you down, but it’s only another month, isn’t it? Five weeks tops? That’s really not so bad when you think of it.”

“Yeah, it’s not too bad,” he said, echoing her hollowly.

“I miss you dreadfully,” she assured him, before launching into a story about the picture Dutch was filming and the party she intended to throw with her sisters at the Villa next weekend. He listened with only half an ear. He wasn’t surprised about her answer to his proposal, but he still felt lousy.

Since Bobby had been born and Nate had booted him out of the bed, he’d accepted that his needs would have to be satisfied by other women. He knew that Nate hated him for it, even though he’d stuck to his original promise and been the soul of discretion. In spite of her rejection, he still desired her and wanted to win her back, but the most she would ever permit was necking and light petting. If he so much as thought about taking things further, she’d squirm out of his grasp. He just didn’t understand, even three years since he’d last made love to her, why he couldn’t have both a wife and the rights that other husbands were entitled to. He’d gone over it in his head a thousand times. Was he a bad lover? Was it her upbringing? Peg’s sermonizing? Her religion? Could she be a lesbian? He didn’t know and God forbid he even try to broach the topic. She’d give him such a withering look before she stalked out of the room that he felt like he ought to be thrown in jail on charges of sex depravity for even mentioning the idea. 

Divorce was out of the question, naturally. There were relationships to preserve: the one with Joe for starters and those with his famous sisters-in-law. He didn’t trust that Nate wouldn’t try to keep the boys from him, either, if he tried to end it. He could just hear her saying to some attorney, ‘Well, he doesn’t see them much anyway.’ In the meantime, all the saphead could do was to keep trying vainly to find that opening in his wife’s affections. Casting her as his leading lady hadn’t worked. Building her a little love-nest, then a great big love-nest, hadn’t worked. He’d recently decided that maybe a real honeymoon instead of the post-nuptial cross-country train trip that had masqueraded as one might work on her. He figured deep down it wouldn’t change her mind, but still he had his foolish hopes. 

When Natalie was done prating, he told her he had to get ready for lunch with Joe and said his goodbyes. There wasn’t any such lunch, but he no longer wanted to talk. 

He ended up spending the afternoon at the new zoo, disguised by a fake moustache, a tweed cap, and jumper vest that constricted him in heat on what was already a sweltering day. It worked, though. No one looked twice at him. The zoo was a disappointment. To begin with, it was extraordinarily tiny, but more importantly most of the animals featured—deer, wild turkey, raccoons—could be seen if you just sat in a Muskegon tree long enough. The most exotic offering consisted of some listless-looking monkeys in cages. A pack of adolescent boys thumped on their wire enclosures and screeched at them to perform. “Pick on someone your own size!” he yelled at them, and they scattered. The monkeys blinked back at him, not seeming to care one way or the other. 

He did have dinner with Joe that night at the Italian Restaurant in the Julius Hotel. As Buster tucked into his truffle tagliatelle, Joe dropped the bomb. 

“We can’t have the flood sequence.”

Buster laughed. “It sounded like you just said ‘We can’t have the flood sequence,’ Joe, but I don’t think I heard you right,” he said, and took a bite of tagliatelle. “Good one, though.”

“I’m not kidding. Think about how it’ll look. You’ve got a river that’s supposed to be the Mississippi—”

“Sacrasippi,” Buster said, lifting his eyebrows.

“Cut it out,” said Joe, frowning. “I’m trying to be serious. You’ve got a river that’s supposed to be the Mississippi and it’s supposed to flood. Well, you know as well as I do that hundreds of people just lost their lives in the Mississippi floods.”

“Since when do you care?” said Buster. If there was one thing he’d always liked about Joe, it was that he let him alone and let him make the pictures his own way. Something about this smelled fishy.

“It’s in poor taste. It’s not going to get laughs, it’s just going to bring bad publicity. I don’t want it to flop. There’s too much money in it.”

Buster set down his fork. Two words had stuck out: publicity and money. “This is Harry, isn’t it?” he said, narrowing his eyes.

Joe gave a slight wave of his hand, dismissing the comment. “Now don’t go blaming Harry. I happen to agree with him. It would be a risky thing, and God knows what it would cost to pull it off anyway.”

“Well that god damn bean-counter,” said Buster, anger flaring. “We’ve already got everything set up for a flood! The entire god damn picture is about a flood. That’s the entire point!”

Joe looked at him with a firm expression. “I’ve made up my mind. We can’t do a flood.”

“Well, we may as well can the whole picture then,” Buster said. “All my best gags are built around the flood. I can’t just start from scratch.”

“Look,” said Joe, continuing to eat his own meal. “We’re talking about lost lives here. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Horseshit,” said Buster. “Remember Chaplin’s picture  _ Shoulder Arms _ ? The ink wasn’t even dry on the Armistice when he released that. I remember ‘cause it was the first thing I saw after I got back from France. Everyone loved it. No one was thinking about how many soldiers had just gotten their heads and legs blown off in the war, they just knew a funny picture when they saw one.” He clenched his left fist in his lap. 

“Why not try another disaster?” Joe said.

“Like what?” he said. He stabbed at the pasta with his fork and took a bite without pleasure.

“I’m not the brains here.”

“What, like a cyclone? Joe, I bet you tornadoes and hurricanes kill more people each year than floods. Sure we wouldn’t get bad reviews and angry letters from folks whose families have been killed by tornadoes?”

Joe waved his hand again. “A cyclone sounds just fine. Anything that’s not a flood, you can do.”

It stunk to high heaven as far as Buster was concerned, but he knew Joe well enough to see when he’d made up his mind. He finished his tagliatelle in silence and didn’t even pretend he was willing to pick up the tab when Joe went to pay. He took a taxi back to the Senator and went to bed early, tossing between the sheets and stewing about his lost flood.  
  


There were butter cookies in the brown paper sack making dark greasy spots on its sides. Nelly stood outside Buster’s dressing room, her heart racing with the memory of what had happened last time she’d stepped inside it. Before she lost her nerve, she tapped on the door. 

“Come in!” called Buster. 

She slipped through and closed the door. He was sitting at his table again, not in costume today but wearing dark slacks and a long-sleeved blue jacquard shirt with faint stripes.

“Hi, it’s Nelly,” she said, by way of greeting. 

“I haven’t forgotten your name,” said Buster, one corner of his mouth quirking. “What do you have there?”

She stepped a few feet forward and extended the bag. “I made you cookies.”

He looked from the bag to her as he took it, surprised. “What did I do to deserve such an honor?”

“I heard you broke your nose,” she said. Indeed, she could see up close that his nose was swollen near the top and there were small faded bruises beneath his eyes, not noticeable unless you were next to him.

“So you baked me cookies.” He peeked inside. 

“Yes. I wanted to thank you, too,” she said, feeling the full ridiculousness of her gesture. “For taking care of me last Friday night.”

“No one’s ever made me get-well cookies before, not even my own mother. I’d just get cod-liver oil, even for sprains.” He sounded pleased.

“How’s your nose?” she said, as he bit into a cookie. 

“Hurts like the dickens,” he said, chewing. “I’m hoping the swelling will go down by Friday so I can start filming again.” He didn’t remark upon the cookie as he finished it, but she noticed he pulled another out of the bag. “We’re doing the night scenes soon.”

She was still a little fuzzy on _ Steamboat Bill _ ’s plot, but this week’s filming had involved hundreds of local extras, and the grander of the two steamboats was piloted up and down the river, belching out huge plumes of black smoke. She’d taken a break to watch the spectacle. The crowd’s enthusiasm for the steamboat seemed real. The whole set certainly looked real thanks to all the props down by the riverside, the small boats, the large pennants reading KING, and the patriotic bunting draped on storefronts. Buster had been on hand near the cameras helping direct, but hadn’t noticed her in the throngs.

Buster went on. “I’ve got this publicity man who says I can’t have a flood because of the lives that were lost when the Mississippi flooded, so we’re changing everything up for a cyclone.”   
  
She marvelled a little that he was telling her anything about the production, but tried not to show it. “I wondered what those airplane propellers and big motors Bert had me order were for,” she said. 

“These are good,” said Buster, pulling a third cookie from the bag. “Remind me to get hurt more often.”

“Or rescue foolish girls from themselves more often,” she said. 

“It was nothing,” he said. 

“It was something to me.” 

He considered her as he started on the third cookie. 

“Anyway, I already took lunch. I’ve got to get back to the shop,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. 

She had her hand on the door when he spoke up again. 

“Why that  _ Shrew _ play, anyway? Why not Juliet?”

She turned back and looked at him, thoroughly confused. She had no idea how he knew about one of her dearest and closest ambitions.

He noticed her puzzlement and clarified. “You said your dream was to star in that  _ Shrew _ play. Why? Why not  _ Romeo and Juliet _ ?”

“I don’t remember telling you that,” she said, feeling abashed

“Well, don’t get bent out of shape about it, I was just asking,” he said, a little defensively. 

“No, I’m not bent out of shape, I’m surprised,” she said, as she faced him. “I don’t remember saying that. I’m afraid of what else I, uh, might have said that night.” She cringed to think of what else might have come out of her mouth. “I hope I didn’t beg you for a break or anything.”

He regarded her with a calm expression. “You didn’t. I’d still like to know, though.”

“Well, Kate has a mind of her own. She wants to control her own fate. Marriage isn’t for her,” she said, conscious of how clumsy her words were. “She’s fun to play.  _ Romeo and Juliet _ is a little boring.”

In truth, it was Katherine’s spirit which she loved, the rebellion against her father and Petruchio, and hang the end of the play. In her experience, the audience never remembered the end of the play, only the beginning and middle where Katherine was at her most defiant and fiery. 

Buster nodded, elbow on the table and finger sliding absently under his lip. The silence stretched on for long enough that Nelly said, “Anyway, I’ll see you around.”

“Thanks for the cookies,” Buster said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s easy when writing a fiction about Buster Keaton to cast Natalie Talmadge as a villain. I prefer to listen to Buster’s granddaughter Melissa Talmadge Cox who points out that the divorce is ancient history and that fans should get over it! Even though I’m writing a story that is obviously canon divergent, I always remember that Buster lived happily ever after with Eleanor Norris Keaton and considered himself to have had a lucky life with very few dark spots.
> 
> Why did Natalie put a end to her sex life with the gorgeous, winsome Buster Keaton? I think the likeliest explanation is that she just wasn’t attracted to him or simply didn’t like sex. I do think Buster really loved her too and wanted things to work out, which is why their marriage lasted as long as it did. I’ve tried to convey that with this story.
> 
> Also, I’m with Natalie. Trying to travel hours on a train with two young rambunctious boys sounds like a nightmare, even with a governess. 
> 
> And yes, the Keaton governess was also named Connie, not to be confused with Constance “Connie” Talmadge, who was also frequently called Dutch.
> 
> Finally, with a lot of digging through newspapers I learned that the date Buster broke his nose was July 30th, 1927! So the first scene takes place on the 31st. The second occurs on Wednesday, August 3rd.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been an intense week. How about a bonus chapter this weekend? Chapter 10 to come tomorrow.

Buster hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and stared up with admiration at the 120-foot crane. Having been delivered to the set in multiple pieces by a fleet of huge trucks, the workmen had just finished putting it together. “Beautiful, ain’t she?”

At his side, Joe grimaced. “Did you have to?”

“ ‘Course I did,” said Buster. “How else are we going to lift the hospital off me in the cyclone sequence?”

“I just didn’t expect it … it’s so big, you know?”

“Damn right it is.”

“How much did it cost?”   
  
“How much did it cost? Really?” Buster said, feeling like Joe had just stuck a pin in his mood and popped it. “It cost what it cost.”

Joe rubbed the back of his neck as he looked up at the crane. “I just wish you’d said something first. Harry’s worried about going over budget.”

“Tell him he can blow it out his ass,” said Buster. “I’m getting damn tired of Harry. Didn’t we all sit down and agree a cyclone was just fine?” He bit his tongue and didn’t say ‘I told you so,’ because if they’d stuck to the original plan, there wouldn’t have been a crane. He wasn’t sure how much the cyclone had run them so far, but it was already over $20,000.

“Yeah, I guess we did. Just try to—” said Joe. “Well don’t go overboard, is what I’m getting at.”

Buster, who had already handsomely paid to go overboard, kept his silence again. “Sure.”

It was a ridiculous conversation for them to have, standing in the shadow of an expensive 120-foot crane, but that was hardly Buster’s problem. 

  
  


On the thirteenth, a Saturday, Nelly dressed up to go to the pictures—Buster’s picture, to be exact—with Joe and Maggie. It was still hot at 5:30 p.m. and her bedroom window was wide open as she made up her face and pinned back her hair in a chignon.

They took a street car to K Street. The sidewalks were still busy when they arrived at the Senator theater around 6:30, everyone parading around in their Saturday night finery. She felt good about the ensemble she’d chosen, a short-sleeved dusty peach cotton dress with a mauve straw cloche hat and silk stockings. Inside, the Senator was cool. She’d been to a picture there only once before, but it was enough to make her fall in love with the place, which had been built just two years prior and was new like everything on the West coast was new. It was adorned in velvet drapes and jardinières heaped with fresh chrysanthemums, plush wall-to-wall carpeting, and fringed lamps, but her favorite feature was the painted dome and the enormous multi-tiered chandelier hanging from its center.

As she and the Kimbles took their seats in the balcony, she looked to the box seats on either side of the theater, half-expecting to see Buster in one, but she didn’t. Maybe he was in the crowd, but there was only so much gawking she could do before attracting attention. She saw him in person nearly every day now, but always at a distance and always when he was busy in front of or behind the camera. River Junction had been a bustle of workmen and noise in the mornings as they rebuilt sets for the cyclone and put together the biggest crane she’d seen in her life. Bert allowed her to take breaks a couple times a day to watch the filming. Even though she was behind the scenes now and could see everything, from the cluster of noisy cameras to the even noisier rain machines, the sight of Buster falling into a puddle up to his waist or being blown off his feet by a gust of wind was still a laugh. On Thursday, she’d been called upon to place an order for five large loaves of bread from a bakery, but they were spirited off to an unknown part of the set and their purpose remained a mystery. 

Her brief acquaintance with Buster seemed to have come to an end and she wasn’t inclined to press it any further, having made an ass of herself the first day in his dressing room and then later after the party at the blind tiger. It was enough that he knew her name. She’d begun hoping that the company would keep her on when they wrapped filming and packed up for Hollywood in a few weeks. The more she stuck around, the more people would know her face, and the more people knew her face, the greater her chances were of being recognized by a studio.

She shared Joe and Maggie’s jumbo box of Junior Mints as the lights went down and the opening short started. An organ in an arched box with pillars provided accompaniment. 

When the opening credits of Buster’s feature began, Nelly’s pulse quickened a little bit. It was surreal when he finally appeared on the screen, walking beneath an umbrella with his mother in the pouring rain, soaked to the skin; she’d gotten used to him as a flesh-and-blood person. She now knew how his production company made that rain and that there were cameras in front of him tracking his every step. She also knew that the person inside the truck driving down the street in the background was an extra. Nevertheless, the scene still looked believable, and pretty soon she was sucked into the story like the rest of the audience.

Buster played a brainy college freshman without a lick of athletic ability, which happened to be the only thing his girl cared about. He spent most of the picture trying out for sports to impress her and failing miserably. Buster often took two or three-hour lunches to play baseball with his production team, so Nelly couldn’t quite buy that he didn’t understand the rules of the game and couldn’t hit a ball to save his life.

As the movie wore on, she became aware—and it gave her an unpleasant sensation, like an itch—that he was better-looking than she remembered. It embarrassed her somewhat to see him in his skimpy track outfit. In one scene where he sat on the sidelines, the shorts rode up so high she could see where his tan ended and his natural skin tone, considerably paler, began. She was almost glad when the movie ended. The last few seconds had been queer, besides. The scene of Buster and his girl walking out of the chapel after being married had melted into a scene of them sitting at home while their children played in the background, then one of them in old age, before concluding with a shot of two headstones.

The organ died away and the lights went up. 

“What on earth did that ending mean?” said Maggie, with a look on her face.

“I don’t know,” said Nelly, but it had given her a bad taste. Judging by the expressions on their neighbors’ faces, they weren’t alone in their confusion. Even in Shakespeare’s time, everyone knew that you ended a comedy with a marriage. To do otherwise was to let your audience down. The abrupt, morbid ending brought her back to reality and reminded her that the real Buster was not to be confused with his handsome, whimsical on-screen counterpart.

Joe was the only one who seemed to find the ending funny and tried explaining it as they made their way up the balcony and down the stairs. Nelly was busy searching the exiting crowd for Buster’s face and only half listened. They made it out onto the sidewalk before she accepted she wasn’t going to see him that night. 

Maggie proposed getting hamburgers before they went home and Joe and Nelly agreed. They found a diner on L Street and sat in a booth with a checkered red-and-white tablecloth.

“So what’s he really like?” Maggie said, after their food arrived and they were tucking into burgers and coleslaw. She was a heavier girl, pretty, with auburn hair and freckles on her nose. Her claim to fame was that her maternal grandfather had been one of the original inhabitants of Sacramento when it was first incorporated. She’d asked Nelly the question before, but Nelly didn’t mind answering it again. Buster had rubbed off some fifteen minutes of fame onto her and there was no sense in not using them. Of course, she hadn’t told them that he was her savior the night of the party; in her untruthful retelling, Bert had played that role. They did know, however, that he had invited her to be an extra and that she’d baked him cookies after his accident with the baseball.

“Not much like that,” said Nelly. She looked up and scanned the faces in the other booths as if one might belong to Buster, but they didn’t. “He smiles in real life, but you know that, I’ve said that before. He can be very solemn. He’s not boyish like he is in pictures. I think he’s a kind person, mostly.” She was almost surprised to hear herself say it, but it was a conclusion she’d come to in spite of how he’d appalled her at their first meeting. He’d been a gentleman through and through when he rescued her at the party and took her back to his hotel room, and she couldn’t help but alter her opinion because of it. “He keeps a lot to himself and sticks to his own pals. And he’s very funny, just as funny as his movies.”

“He’s a real athlete too,” Joe said. “He can’t hide that.”

Nelly agreed. “Yes, he plays a lot of baseball with his team.”

“I liked the picture anyway. The gags were funny,” said Joe.

“It was alright,” Nelly said. 

Maggie added, “I’m still not keen on that ending.”

“No,” said Nelly. 

They ate their burgers and the conversation moved to the Senators game (everything was called Senator here since Sacramento was the capital) and how, according to Joe at least, the team hadn’t been the same since Brick Eldred (whoever he was) left. It was getting late by the time they left the diner, and they took a taxi back to 22nd Street, Nelly and Maggie deciding that they’d forgo the dance hall for the evening. 

Nelly had almost forgotten about Buster by the time she crawled into bed around eleven. She tried to drift off by boring herself with thoughts of baseball. Her father and uncle liked the White Sox, but she’d never really understood or cared for the game. Her only memory of the game she’d been taken to as a little girl was of eating hot dogs and popcorn and wandering the stands with Ruthie. Although she couldn’t say why, fantasies of men had not been satisfying since the incident with Tommy, not even her go-to of John Barrymore. The idea that a man might take up baseball or another sport he was abysmal at in order to win the love of a girl seemed laughable now that she thought about it, but Buster had done it—and more—in  _ College _ . He’d even rescued the girl from his rival who was trying to ruin her reputation.

Her eyes shot open. She hadn’t thought of it until now, but Buster had rescued her that night at the blind tiger. Of course, he hadn’t done it out of a sense of love and there was no reading into the coincidence since the picture had been shot long before she’d met Tommy or Buster, but it struck her regardless. Maybe Buster’s pictures did reveal something of his character. As she puzzled over it, her thoughts got hazier and hazier, until finally she dropped off to sleep. 


	10. Chapter 10

The last two-and-a-half weeks of August went by in a pleasant blur. Buster almost forgot about Harry Brand’s gripes and grudges as he indulged his inner boy with the cyclone sequence. He spent the days slipping through mud, battling wind, clinging to an uprooted tree swung by the enormous crane, and clambering all over the Colusa. The production team landed a building on top of him and splintered it to pieces just after he walked out. They tore another building away from him, leaving him looking bewildered in a hospital bed. They slid buildings and piers into the river and rammed the steamboat into a building floating in the river. The more the sets collapsed around him, the more buildings were destroyed, the better he felt about _Steamboat_ . He felt sure that next to _The General_ , it would have the best finish of any of his pictures.

Louise, Jingles, and Myra took a train up one day so that Louise could double for Peanuts, who couldn’t swim, in the rescue scene. He put them up in the Senator where they played cards in the evenings and reminisced about Muskegon and life on the road. When his family wasn’t there, he spent the nights dining in good restaurants and playing bridge. If he tired of these activities, there was always a pretty girl nearby for added recreation.

All in all, the uneasy feelings that had been on him since he’d begun filming were receding like so many floodwaters. 

The final days of filming whizzed by. Nelly was so busy on the set helping stage buildings and managing the props within that she found it difficult to find a spare moment to write home. The workmen had put in a considerable amount of time the previous weeks fashioning breakaway buildings—a library, a hospital, a corner building—for the grand finale. Most of these, with the exception of the library, had to be fully furnished, paintings hung on the wall and lamps and sofas and chairs arranged just so for maximum realism. If she had learned anything from her short time in pictures, it was that Buster did nothing by halves. Every detail was important to him. When she wasn’t working, she was watching the awesome destruction of the little town on the banks of the Sacramento River. With the Liberty wind machines gusting and papers and other debris blowing pell-mell into the river, facades collapsed with thundering crashes and buildings splashed into the river. Buster spent one afternoon in front of the wind machines trying to stay upright for laughs. The machines did a number on him, skidding him face first through the mud and nearly ripping his shirt off at one point. He was panting by the time the engines were turned off. She was surprised that he didn’t hurt himself, especially when the crane picked up the tree he clung to and dipped it up and down before dumping him into the river. Upon her return to Joe and Maggie’s each night, she had time for dinner, a conversation about the day’s filming, and a bath before sheer exhaustion claimed her. Her family and her old life seemed a million miles away even though she’d been away barely two months.

Every week, a postcard from her mother arrived. _I never hear from you. Are you sure everything is okay? Please write or telephone me as soon as possible, Nelly dear._

A spare moment came on Sunday the 28th, the day after filming wrapped and also the day before she was to begin arranging the shipment of the entire contents of the prop house back to Hollywood. Joe and Maggie were at church and had given her permission to use their phone. She called her mother at ten o’clock, knowing that it would be noon back in Evanston and both church and lunch would be finished. 

“Hi, Mother,” she said, when Lena picked up.

“Is that really Nelly? Well I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” said her mother. “Your father and I have been worrying our heads off about you.”

Nelly suspected they really hadn’t, but didn’t say so. “I’m sorry, I’ve been so busy here. I’ve hardly had a minute to myself. I work practically from sun-up to sundown.”

“Are you famous yet? Is that Keaton going to put you in his next picture?”

“No. And not as far as I know,” Nelly said. Her mother knew that she was acquainted with Buster and that he was a big name in pictures, but was too out-of-touch with the film world to be as impressed by it as she might have been. 

“Well I wanted to tell you that Ruthie’s going to have a baby again,” said her mother. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Nelly’s stomach sank. “Oh my, that’s marvelous!” she said, forcing a smile into her voice.

She and Ruthie had been close as children, but drifted apart as they matured. Nelly liked books and the theater, Ruthie liked boys and homemaking. The younger by two years, Ruthie had always been her mother’s pet. That relationship had only strengthened when Ruthie married auspiciously at nineteen and had her first baby by twenty. This would be baby number three. Nelly loved her niece and nephew, but there was a stiffness to them that she didn’t like to see—as though they were an extension of Ruthie’s big, clean house with all mechanicals and servants running in regimented order.

“She thinks she’ll have it in February,” her mother said. “A St. Valentine’s Day baby. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Nelly agreed that it would. 

“You know, Harold Jenkins still asks after you every Sunday at church.”

“Does he?” she said. She had not been to church since leaving Evanston, something she’d never tell her mother, and was very grateful to not have seen the loathsome Harold Jenkins for as long. 

“Are you seeing anybody out there in Sacramento?” said her mother.

“Of course not. When would I have the time?” she said. 

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose there are dances on the weekend, aren’t there?” 

“I’ve gone to see the pictures a few times, but mostly I’m too tired to do anything on weekends. I work Saturdays, you know.”

The conversation was headed where it invariably did, the lines so predictable Nelly could recite them in her head. 

Mother: _When are you going to get married?_

Nelly: _When I find the right man._

M: _Are you looking?_

N: _No, I am not._

M: _Time is running out on you having children._

N: _I know it is, Mother._

M: _I just want to see you happy and settled down._

N: _I know, Mother._

Marriage had never factored into Nelly’s plans as it had Ruthie’s. She assumed she’d get there eventually, but her real dreams had been built around the theater since she’d been ten years old and seen her first play. The possibility of having children seemed even hazier than marriage. She knew she was getting older and wouldn’t have forever to decide, but she also knew that marriage and children would put an end to her theater career. She wasn’t eager to declare the dream deceased before it ever lived.

“When are you going to settle down?” her mother asked. 

Nelly did not attempt to conceal her sigh. “Just as soon as I find the right fellow.” She was half-tempted to add how bad she’d been at choosing men of late, what with the near brush she’d had with Tommy and the other workmen. 

“I just want to see you happy. You’re already twenty-six. I had you and Ruthie by then,” she said. 

“I _am_ happy, Mother,” she said, frowning. “I’m working for a big star and I’m going to try out for a role in some of the other pictures just as soon as this one’s wrapped up. I don’t mind being an old maid. I’m happy. Who says happiness is marrying and having babies. What if I married the wrong fellow? I’d be a lot worse off than I am now.”

“I know you have more sense than to do that, dear,” said her mother, brushing aside her argument. “And you will be happy! I was when I met your father, and Ruthie and Gerald couldn’t be happier. It only gets better when the babies come along.”

Nelly rolled her eyes and withheld multiple sarcastic replies. “I’d better be going now. I’ve got a lot of cleaning to do. I promised Maggie and Joe I’d help.” She felt bad lying to her mother, but there was a danger of her losing her temper and that undoubtedly was a worse sin. 

“Okay. I do hope you can make it back to Evanston in time for the baby to be born. Your father sends his love.”

Nelly sent her love in kind and said her goodbyes. She went upstairs and sat in her open window after she’d hung up the phone. 

“ _She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, my household stuff, my field, my barn, my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything_ ,” she muttered. Spoken previously by John Barrymore in one of her fantasies, the words had seemed romantic, but they didn’t seem that way anymore. She never wanted to become a man’s chattel or ass, his anything rather than everything. 

The breeze was warm and the lemon tree outside the window was plump with still green fruit. No matter what her mother said, this was happiness. She was earning her own wage and working in pictures, and she didn’t have to go to church every week and endure Halitosis Harold’s clumsy attempts at courting. There was also Buster. Just being near his genius made her feel like a piece of dry tinder next to a spark. If they were acquainted long enough, she felt certain that she would ignite with the same ingenious fire that burned in him.


	11. Chapter 11

Filming for  _ Steamboat _ had wrapped by the first Saturday in September. Weeks of cutting still remained on the horizon, but Buster could do that from the comfort of his production room at the Villa. The cutting was precisely why he was now knocking on Joe’s office door. If he had anything to say about it, the words ‘Supervised by Harry Brand’ would not appear anywhere in the credits. Once was more than enough. 

“Come in,” said Joe. 

Buster walked in and seated himself in the chair in front of Schenck’s desk. 

“What’s on your mind?” said Joe. He was drinking coffee.

“The picture. What’s on anyone’s mind right now?” said Buster affably.

“Sure,” said Joe. “Still on track to finish tomorrow?”

“That’s the plan,” said Buster. 

Joe wasn’t stupid and Buster could see that he was trying to figure out what the visit was about. He seemed a little uneasy as he sipped his coffee.

“So,” said Joe. 

“Sew buttons,” Buster said, the witticism lame and off-handed, before getting down to business. “Anyway, I was thinking about how we’re going to cut the picture and that got me to thinking about the credits. About how we’re doing things in general.”

Joe looked at him, waiting for him to go on.

“So you’ve got a picture. Say it’s a Doug Fairbanks picture. For example, Doug comes on and you say, ‘Douglas Fairbanks supervised by Joe Doakes.’ It’s bad on the face of it. You’re belittling Fairbanks. Fairbanks, not Doakes, is what you’re selling.” Buster leaned forward and knit his hands on the desk. 

“I’m listening,” said Joe. A frown was creeping onto his face. 

“When you’re talking about a picture, what do you really need? Three things. One man writes it, another man directs it, and a star acts it. Those three people are responsible for every great picture that was ever made. In some cases one man is all three—Chaplin,” said Buster.

“I see where you’re going with this and I disagree,” said Joe, giving a frown. “Supervisors are the big thing. All the big studios are using them.”

“Maybe they are,” he said. “But they can be wrong. It’s not going to last long. The whole damned thing’s a bad joke.”

Joe shook his head, looking displeased.

Buster laid the trump card on the table, poker-faced but confident. “There’ll be no more supervisors in the pictures Buster Keaton makes.”

He waited for Joe to reply. As the seconds ticked by in silence, he began to wonder if he was in for a real fight. He’d said he was taking the pot, but maybe Joe didn’t know that he wasn’t bluffing.

At last, Joe cleared his throat and said something. Buster had to lean forward to catch it. His brain grappled with the words, not comprehending.

_ Buster Keaton isn’t going to make any more pictures _ .

That’s what Joe had said. 

He sat back in stunned silence as Joe continued. 

“No, no,” said Joe. “That didn’t come out right. What I mean, Buster, is that you’re not going to make any more pictures for me. I’m dissolving the studio.”

“Why?” Buster managed to say. His lips felt tight and dry. 

“Now I don’t want you to worry,” Joe said, holding up a hand in a benevolent way. “I’ve gotten it all straightened out. You’re going over to M-G-M. That’s where Nick is. He’ll take great care of you. Look, I know it’s not what you want, but just think about it for a minute. You’ll have ten times the opportunities. A whole staff of writers working for you, helping you with cutting and production and stories. The money’s bigger. The pictures will be better. You can’t lose, it’s a chance of a lifetime.”

Buster couldn’t make his mouth work. Joe was now waxing poetic about the settlement Buster would be getting for his interests in the studio. The studio? His studio. Buster Keaton Productions. Five thousand dollars for eight years of making millions for Joe, and now he was finding out in the worst possible that he didn’t have the power in his own enterprise that he thought he did.

“Nick will treat you just like his own son. I’m telling you, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Joe was more animated now as he reviewed the details. It was clear that he had been chewing on this decision for a while now and there was no appealing it. 

Buster listened on in disbelief. An image was crystalizing in his mind of a theater trunk sitting in an alley, left behind and forgotten. He’d felt exactly the same way the day he’d split up The Three Keatons. 

He didn’t remember what he said to Joe before leaving the office. He didn’t even remember leaving the office. He just found himself walking east on Romaine Street toward 1025 Lillian Way. His thoughts couldn’t seem to coalesce. He supposed he was in shock. Part of him wanted to think that it was all a dirty joke, but Joe—Joe, who attended the Sunday barbecues at the Villa faithfully, who had been so worried for Buster when he’d returned from France that he’d emptied his wallet for him, who’d lent Buster money to buy his first house—had never been that kind of man when it came to serious matters. Buster was torn between wanting a stiff drink and wanting to jump off a bridge. 

He did neither, of course. Back at Lillian Way, there was a film to finish. He now knew what the crowning gag would be. Tomorrow, the Saphead Would Face Down Certain Death. Whether he survived, he didn’t much care at the moment.

  
  


Nelly had never worked on a Sunday before, but the Sunday before Labor Day was the final day of shooting and she couldn’t object even if she wanted to. Of course she didn’t want to. She’d been with the picture from almost the first and couldn’t think of a greater honor than finishing it out. The other actors and much of the crew had departed since they’d left Sacramento, and now it was just her, Bert, Buster, and a skeleton crew. A small set had been built on the United Artists lot and she was presently furnishing a small two-story house. The second story needed only to be filled with boxes, but the main floor required homey touches, so she and Bert arranged a rug, a sofa, a chair, and pictures on the wall. She set a lamp on a table in the center of the room. The house had a breakaway facade that was lying face-down in the dirt, but had hinges enabling it to be drawn up. 

As she decided whether a fringed floor lamp should go to the left or right of the sofa, Buster and one of the crew walked up. They both got on top of the flat facade and she watched, pretending to be busy with the lamp, as Buster stood in the frame of an open second-story window and looked to the top of the house. She positioned the lamp to the left of the sofa and slid the cord under it and out of sight. When she glanced at Buster again, he was hammering a nail into the dirt inside the window frame. She couldn’t imagine what he was doing. Plumping one of the throw pillows on the sofa, she looked again. He was hammering a second nail.   
  
“This’ll do it,” he said to the crewmember.

Bert came through the back door of the house with an armful of curtains as Buster and the crewmember walked away. 

“What’s he doing?” Nelly said to him under her breath.

“Buster?” said Bert, sounding a little out of breath as he dumped the curtains on the sofa. “Figuring out where to stand. The facade’s gonna come down right on top of him. Except he ends up in the window and doesn’t get hurt.”

“On top of him?” said Nelly, her innards seeming to go cold. The breakaway facades weighed a ton. The crew and cast had been warned to stay well away from them when the previous breakaway scenes were filmed, since getting caught underneath one would spell catastrophe.

“That’s right,” said Bert. “It was just supposed to fall down near him, scare him a little bit, then he’d run toward another building and it would fall down too, but he got the idea to have the window pass over him last night he said.” Bert didn’t seem to be at all perturbed by the nature of the stunt as he set to hanging a curtain.

“He’s going to get killed!” Nelly said, rooted to the spot. “That facade has to weigh at least a ton.”

“Two tons,” Bert said, walking across the room and pulling down another curtain rod. He eased a curtain onto it.

Nelly felt panicked. “He’s crazy. He’ll get killed. Has anyone tried talking him out of it?”

Bert laughed. “You think anyone has ever talked Buster Keaton out of anything once he’s got an idea in his head?”

“He’ll be killed,” she said. She was starting to feel almost hysterical. 

“Trust Buster,” Bert said, stretching up to hang the curtain on his tiptoes. “He’s always fine.”   
  
Nelly sat down on the couch, trying to calm her thoughts. Bert was probably right, but suppose …

All of her supposes, like the hinges failing or a wind machine shifting the facade just inches in either direction, ended up with Buster crushed to death. Bert walked back out the back door and she barely noticed. She tried to think of some way to stop the maddening act, but couldn’t. She didn’t know Buster as well as Bert, but she knew Bert was right. Nothing stopped Buster once he was set on something.

“Better move, sweetheart, we don’t want you in the scene.” She looked up and Buster was at the corner of the house peering in at her. 

It was her chance to beg him to reconsider, to throw herself on him, scream, and rend his clothes. Instead, she apologized and let herself out the back door. There was nothing that causing a ruckus would do except delay filming and possibly get her kicked off the set, spoiling her future chances of working for the Buster Keaton Studios. The facade gave a titanic creaking as it was eased back into place. Outside of the set, a couple crew members were wetting the dirt in front of the house with a hose so that it was slick and muddy as if from a cyclone. Nelly made her way toward some other crew members clustered off-camera to the right of the house. As she got closer, she noticed they were huddled in a funny way. 

“... _ hallowed be thy name _

_ Thy kingdom come, thy will be done _

_ On earth as it is in heaven _ .”

They were praying. The realization almost made her sick to her stomach. She didn’t go in for religion, but as she stopped in their midst, she made the decision to join them. If there was any chance the prayer would spare Buster, it was worth it. The ending lines had a foreboding potency they’d never had before.

“ _ But deliver us from evil _

_ Now and at the hour of our death _ .”

The hour of our death. She looked up and saw Buster a few feet from them, looking placid in his baggy pants and suspenders. Was she seeing a man in the final hour of his life? If she had any sense, she’d leave. There was no reason to watch this. Yet she felt duty-bound to stay. A superstition said that maybe it would help preserve him from the stunt going wrong. 

She watched Buster helplessly as the minutes went by and the final preparations were made to the set and the cameras. The wind machines were turned on and Buster walked in front of the house. He went down to his knees and sprawled out flat onto his chest in the mud.

“What’s he doing?” she said to one of the electricians.

“Continuity,” the electrician replied. “He was muddy in the scene we shot yesterday.”

The cameraman yelled something she didn’t hear and Buster walked in front of the house. He faced one of the cameras. Nelly felt almost light-headed. What if the wind had blown the nails out of place? What if—

Buster rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his jaw. The house’s machinery groaned and the facade heaved forward. At the last second, she turned her head. There was a gut-wrenching thud as the facade landed. Tears sprang into her eyes. 

After an interminable second or so, a roar went up from the men around her and they began to clap. She looked back. Through the glaze of her tears, she could just make out Buster, still rubbing his neck and rolling his jaw nonchalantly. A great cloud of dust had sprung up. Buster pretended to suddenly realize what had just happened and dashed out of the ruined facade, stopping once at a safe distance to stare at the house in terror. 

“Cut!” shouted the cameraman over the wind.

The group of men headed toward Buster at a clip. There were hoots and handshakes and claps on the back, and Buster was grinning. Nelly shielded her face with her hand and cried, overcome with relief. She still felt weak and sick. 

“Why are you crying?” said Buster.

He had crept up without her noticing. She turned her face away quickly, shaking her head. “Because you’re a damned idiot!” she said, not caring now whether speaking her mind would ruin her chances of staying on with him. “You had no business doing that.”

Buster touched her shoulder. “Look, I’m okay, ain’t I?”

She shied away. “No gag is worth your life,” she said. 

Buster looked surprised. His hand fell from her shoulder. “Okay.”

He left to go talk to the second cameraman and Nelly stole away, tears still coming, feeling downright dreadful. She wished she hadn’t stayed on for the final day of filming. It hadn’t been the celebratory end she’d expected. It had been awful, like seeing a man trying to commit suicide but by a miracle failing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buster’s “breakup” dialogue with Joe Schenck is adapted from the Rudi Blesh biography.


	12. Chapter 12

The Monday after Labor Day, Buster took a train to New York City to see Adolph Zukor. Nate fretted, but didn’t offer to go with him. By now, the Talmadges knew of Joe’s decision to close the studio. In front of them, Buster pretended that the move to M-G-M was everything he’d ever wanted. The girls were sharp, though, and he didn’t think Norma and Dutch were fooled. Peg certainly wasn’t. She’d always had the knack for seeing right through him and tutted when the big promotion (the big demotion, as Buster thought of it), was brought up at brunch the following weekend. He could tell she wanted to declare him on the down-and-out, but she couldn’t argue with the handsome salary Joe was promising. Nate wasn’t fooled, either, but that was because he told her how he really felt. She tried to soothe him, but it was obvious to Buster she thought he was making a mountain of a molehill. Probably relieved that her shoe budget wouldn’t be interrupted, he thought cynically.

He’d had phone calls from Chaplin and Lloyd the previous week; both thought it was suicide to go over to M-G-M and give up his independence. Their opinion doubled his resolve to fight for his own studio. Hence New York, hence the meeting with Zukor. Buster had a hunch that Zukor could be convinced to see his point of view. First impressions mattered, and Zukor’s first impression of Buster had been the night he and Roscoe pulled the unforgettable Clumsy Butler Prank at Roscoe’s fancy dinner party. Buster could think of no more persuasive argument than that for getting Zukor to distribute his films.

It turned out that Zukor didn’t see it that way. Expressing regret, he explained that since Paramount had just contracted to release Lloyd’s films, it wouldn’t be fair of Buster to steal Lloyd’s spotlight and ruin his chances. Buster got the real gist of it when Zukor excused himself to go to the john and he noticed a letter bearing the letterhead of the Hays Office near the top of the pile of papers on Zukor’s big desk. Playing a hunch, he slid it out and scanned the contents. He didn’t have long to read before Zuk got back, but the phrases “Buster Keaton” and “exclusive property of M-G-M” stuck out. It was as he suspected. Even though he hadn’t signed a contract yet, he was already considered their chattel.

Back at his hotel, he poured one whiskey after another as he fumed. Zukor’s argument didn’t hold the least bit of water. Hadn’t United Artists been releasing both him and Chaplin for years now? It was time to play his final card, so with several whiskeys under his belt, he went to Nick Schenck.

“Why are you fighting this?” said Nick, with an incredulous look on his face. “It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

Nick reeled off his brother’s lines about the top-notch writers, directors, and sets that Buster would have at M-G-M. Buster wasn’t to forget about the money either. More money than you’ve ever seen in your life.

_ Fuck the money _ , was what Buster wanted to say. He’d been earning his way since he was a tot. The money had always been there and there was no reason to assume it would ever go away as long as he still had ideas in his head and could fall flat on his face without taking a bruise.

But he couldn’t see a way out of the M-G-M conundrum. He didn’t doubt his ability to find a couple lots, a few buildings, some props, and recreate Lillian Way. He had a loyal crew and his core group of gagmen. There was no point in trying, though, without somebody to release the films—and it would seem that M-G-M had already blacklisted him. 

So he went back to his hotel again and drank. He returned to California four days later to continue cutting  _ Steamboat _ .

In early October, he and Natalie headed west to Pittsburgh to see Murderers’ Row face the Pirates in the World Series. They celebrated his birthday in a Pullman car somewhere near Galesburg, Illinois. He blew out the candles of his chocolate cake, ushering in his thirty-second year on earth and thinking that he’d never felt more of a wash-up. Natalie got him two expensive ties, a box of fine cigars, and a fine silk Japanese dressing gown, but it wasn’t anything that he wanted from her. What he wanted, to start with, was to not sleep in separate berths. He wanted her to show more than a glancing interest in his ideas for new pictures. That would do for a start. 

At Forbes Field, the Yanks won 5-4 in the first game. Natalie gave up on Games 2, 3, and 4, but came with him to New York for Game 3. Babe Ruth hit a homer in Game 4. It was tied in the top of the ninth until the Kentucky Colonel scored on a wild pitch and brought it home in the bottom of the ninth, winning the Series for the Yanks. That made Buster feel better, but only for a short while. 

In New York, Natalie shopped with Constance. Buster sat in his hotel room racking his brains for a solution to his big problem that everyone except Chaplin and Lloyd told him wasn’t a problem. He sometimes thought about  _ Snap Shots _ , his new picture, but mostly he thought about his big problem. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t think of a solution. Little by little, resignation seeped in. He wondered if this was how his old man had felt when the Little Fellow Who Couldn’t Be Damaged had abandoned him for a career in pictures.

He drank and drank, but it didn’t give him a solution, either. He was stumped. 

  
  


Nelly needn’t have worried about Buster being appalled by her outburst after the facade scene; she discovered a week later that Buster Keaton Studios was dissolving altogether. “Don’t say nothing though, you’re not supposed to know,” Bert said, when she came to collect her radio from the prop shop at Lillian Way. “He hasn’t told the papers yet.”

She was stunned. “Dissolving? Why?”

“M-G-M cut him a deal he couldn’t refuse. Says he’s taking us with, the ones who’ve been with him the longest, but like I said, you didn’t hear this from me.” Bert glanced around in a furtive way, as if someone might be listening. 

“No room for the new kid,” she said, realization dawning. 

“Sorry, kid,” said Bert, touching her arm. “Lemme give you my telephone number, though. If you need me to put in a word for you anywhere.”

That was how Nelly came to find herself on the United Artists lot a day later, dressed smartly in her orange Canton silk dress and hesitating, once again, outside of a door, not knowing the sort of reception she would receive behind it. This was the door to the waiting room of the casting office. In her handbag was a folded, typewritten piece of paper giving her experience, all the way down to a high-school production of  _ Alice in Wonderland  _ when she was sixteen. She hoped that the words  _ Steamboat Bill, Jr. - Buster Keaton  _ at the top of the page would help make up for her rather one-note acting experience in Evanston. 

The waiting room of the casting office was, to her relief, an equal mix of men and women, perhaps a dozen in total. She’d expected all women. She opened her copy of  _ An American Tragedy _ , but her reading speed was considerably slow as she sneaked looks at the competition. She was prettier, she concluded, than half of the prospective actresses, but she wasn’t so sure about the other half. Every twenty minutes a man in a room would call out “Next!” and everyone would look up, feigning like they weren’t nervous.

She finished six chapters while she waited, there nearly two hours. When her chance finally came to go into the room with the closed door, she found two men behind a desk smoking cigarettes. They didn’t look particularly happy to see her, though she put on a big smile. They told her they were casting for a D.W. Griffith film. There would be a scene in a jazz nightclub and could she dance? She’d never been confident in her dancing skills, but professed herself a regular Isadora Duncan. 

“Says here you worked in the prop department for Keaton,” said the younger of the men. 

“That’s right, sir.”

“We could use you right away in the prop department here, if you’re willing. And you worked on scenery before? Painted backdrops, says here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We could use some help there, too.”

When she left the room, she felt dazed. She was to show up at the prop building on the United Artists lot at 7:30 the following morning. As to the Griffith film, nothing further had been said. Though it hadn’t been what she’d wanted or expected, her foot was back in the Hollywood door and she could afford the little three-room apartment she’d recently rented on Genesee Avenue.

And so that was how the rest of September passed. She was back to managing and ordering inventory. Some days, she would pitch in for a few hours working on a backdrop, wearing paint-splattered denim overalls and looking like a twelve-year-old tomboy. She learned a little more about the Griffith film through the grapevine. It was called  _ The Battle of the Sexes  _ and no extras were yet required, which she was relieved to hear. She hadn’t missed her chance yet.

The grapevine put a crashing halt to her easy routine in October: John Barrymore was making a new film called  _ Tempest _ and extras would be required.

Buster was swimming when Caruthers came down the stairs leading to the pool at a brisk pace. “Telephone for you,” he said, as he got closer.

Buster stopped mid-breaststroke and bobbed. “Is it important or something?” It was a cool eighty degrees out and he was enjoying himself.   
  
“Well it’s a girl,” said Caruthers, shrugging. “Didn’t ask her name.”

That piqued his interest. “Guess I’ll take it. Nate isn’t back, is she?”

Caruthers, who’d been at his side longer than Natalie had and knew perfectly well what such calls meant, shook his head. Buster climbed out of the pool and smoothed his hands back over his head, squeezing out water. He ascended the sixty marble stairs carefully, mindful that his dripping could make them slick. It took him so long to get up the stairs—it always took long to get up the stairs, the price of opulence—he somewhat doubted whether the girl would still be on the line once he arrived in the foyer. 

“Hello?” he said, holding the phone to his ear and dripping a little on the checkerboard marble floor of the foyer. He was out of breath from the steps. 

“Hello, is this Buster?”

He didn’t recognize the voice one the other end. “Who’s this?” he said. 

“It’s, uh, Nelly. From the prop house on  _ Steamboat _ ?”

“Oh. Hello.” He was confused.

“I’m sorry to call you like this. I hope it’s not a bother. Bert gave me your number.”

“You’re using a dial telephone, then.”

“Well, yes. I didn’t think the operator would put me over if I just asked to speak to a movie star. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t irritated on top of being confused. 

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said, all feminine apologies and politeness.

“No, go on.” He decided not to tell her about standing there in his wet bathing trunks lest she proceed to apologize for the next five minutes.

“I hate to ask, I can’t believe I’m asking, but they’re casting for a new Barrymore film right now. You’re—” Her words broke off and he could actually hear the deep breath she took. “You’re the only one I know who could put in a word.”

“Oh,” he said. He’d accused her of having an angle back when he first met her, but now that she was playing one he didn’t know what to say.

“You can say no,” she said, the words rushed, “but ever since I got here, all I keep hearing is that it’s all about who you know. I’m just trying out to be an extra. I don’t even know if they have any parts for girls other than the lead.”

“Who’s directing?” he said.

“Sam Taylor. Do you know him?”

“Not well.”

“Oh …” She trailed off. 

Buster, in the meantime, had latched onto a brilliant solution. “How’d you like to come to my place for a party on Saturday?”

Nelly was silent for a moment. “I’d love to, but you don’t have to—”

“Jack Barrymore himself will be here. You can ask him yourself.” He was pleased to have solved the problem, never mind that Hollywood’s biggest stars would be in attendance and she was just a prop girl. Well, she wanted to be in pictures. Let her sink or swim.

“I don’t know what to say.” She paused. “Are you sure? I don’t want to impose. I’m fine if you just put in a word with him, honest.”

She sounded genuine, but his mind was made up. “The party starts at six,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

After he’d hung up, he went back to the pool and finished his swim. Natalie phoned to tell him that she and the kids would be spending the night at Peg’s. That was fine by him. He had lobster for dinner and afterwards Caruthers made him a Manhattan, then another. He shot some pool in the billiards room under the coffered oak ceiling, the priceless chandelier that hung above the pool table crisply illuminating each shot. When he tired of that, he retreated to the balcony outside his bedroom and enjoyed the warm, sweet smell of the night air along with a Cuban cigar. In that moment, he could almost believe that everything in his life would work out okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The swimming pool scene takes place on 20 October, 1927.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a beautiful day today. You can thank Uncle Joe and Aunt Kamala that this chapter is a few days early.

Nelly had never suffered stage fright in the theater, but as her taxi pulled up to the Villa, she felt like she was getting a year’s worth at once. Her taxi wasn’t the only vehicle in the front drive. A handsome red-and-black Packard was there, expelling a man in a seersucker suit and a fashionable woman who shimmered in a dress the color of a deep blue sapphire. She wished desperately for a drink. She wished that she hadn’t eaten a plate of scalloped ham and potatoes before leaving. She wished that she’d asked Buster what to wear, how to comport herself, what to say, but all she had to go on were her own acting skills and a small measure of courage. She wondered if he’d be surprised to see her show up, if he’d forgotten the invitation altogether.

She had rented her dress from Carmela’s for the handsome sum of $37. It was pale green like a luna moth and layered in silks and crepe de chine. Silver beading was stitched across the front in a design vaguely resembling a rising phoenix. She’d also purchased a white-feathered rhinestone headpiece for $12, but her necklace was her own and its green gemstones only glass. Her hair was waved, each side done up in a braided bun. For her lips she’d chosen a dark rose, and she’d applied some turquoise shadow to her lids above the kohl liner. She felt like a perfect imposter, albeit an elegant one. 

Until they’d pulled up his drive and she’d sighted the Villa, she hadn’t really understood just how rich Buster Keaton was. The residence was white and enormous, a sort of boxcar shape with both ends bent inward, with a red clay-tile roof and another large house to the left as you were approaching the Villa from the back. A long paved drive wound up the back of the house where palm trees, Mediterranean cypresses, and a carpet bed of flowers studded the hills. Buster’s easy, humble manner on the few occasions she’d interacted with him in person had made her feel increasingly at ease with him. It had begun to feel like they were on the same level. Now she realized how incorrect that feeling had been. She’d been in a few stately houses back in Evanston—those belonging to her mother’s higher-society friends—but they were nothing to the sprawling grandeur of The Villa. 

The jets of a stone fountain in the center of the front drive splashed pleasantly as Nelly stepped out of the car and tipped the driver, holding her door, with a five-dollar bill. She smiled and tried to look easy, like she belonged there and was in the habit of handing out handsome tips. Her only thought as she approached the tall arched doorway of the Villa was,  _ I’m going to flub my lines _ .

It was a warm night and no one was wearing coats, but there was a maid in the foyer prepared to take them nonetheless. Just outside of the foyer, a beautiful young woman was smiling and clasping the hand of another beautiful young woman, who was accompanied by a beautiful young man. The beautiful young woman looked a whole lot like Norma Talmage and Nelly realized that she was none other than Natalie. Her heart went wild. Before she had time to think about what she would say, it was her turn to greet the hostess.

“How do you do?” she said.

“Very well. How do you do?” said Natalie, smiling. She was slim and petite, with a dark bob parted on the side and prettily waved.

“Very well. I’m Nelly. I worked with Bus—your husband—on  _ Steamboat Bill _ .” She didn’t know what made her blurt it, only that Natalie was looking at her without a hint of recognition in her eyes and Nelly felt she owed an explanation for how a nobody like her ended up among the big names. She fancied that she saw something in Natalie’s expression change a little, but the smile didn’t waver.

“Very pleased to meet you. You’ll find refreshments just over there. Buster will be down in a little while. I’m sure he’ll be pleased you came.”

Nelly wanted to do something to soften Natalie’s impression of her, compliment the house or her dress, a costly-looking beaded yellow one that hit slightly above the knee, but she was already greeting the next guest.

Seven or so couples mingled in the space beyond the foyer. There were two square white columns supporting an upper level, a majestic stone staircase leading up to it on the right, and arched doorways to the left and right leading to unseen parts of the house. There were arched doorways everywhere, in fact, and a long table filled with an assortment of French  _ hors d’oeuvre _ . A recessed area with white-streaked black marble steps stood at the rear of the open room, leading out to a loggia from which Nelly could just see the backyard. She itched to find the washroom so she could powder the sweat off her face.

A butler appeared at her elbow offering a cocktail and she took it at once. When she was sure no one was watching, she gulped it in one go and hid the glass on a nearby table. She had no business being here. She wondered whether she was meant to have invited somebody. All of the other couples seemed to know each other and were engrossed in conversation, and she was the only one without a partner. She stood on the checkerboard marble floor with her hands knit in front of her, smiling and trying her best to project an air of belonging.

That smile faltered when she saw who came through foyer next. It was Louise Brooks! She was wearing a low-cut black gown that revealed the cleavage of her small breasts and her lips were a deep cherry red. She was accompanied by a man that Nelly didn’t recognize. Nelly’s mouth began to go dry and she was keenly aware of how damp her underarms had become. She had nothing to anchor herself to for comfort or security. As the minutes ticked by and she remained unacknowledged by the other guests besides polite smiles and nods, she began to feel hot and dizzy. Her heart was beating rapidly. She needed to escape. She wondered if anyone would notice if she made a casual break for the loggia.

“Hey, Buster!” a man called. Some people pointed up and waved. Nelly followed their eyes and saw Buster on the second level above the loggia. He put up his hand gravely like a king recognizing his subjects and started down the stairs.

In the next horrifying moment, he lost his footing and took a hard tumble straight down. The room erupted in gasps and shouts. Buster had come to rest on his back at the foot of the stairs with his limbs splayed. His eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. Some of the guests rushed toward him.

Then, with a mildly baffled expression, he stood up and brushed the dust off the arms of his suit jacket. Someone began clapping and pretty soon everyone joined in, laughing and cheering him. Only then did Nelly realize it had been a pratfall. She didn’t know if it was funny. The sight of him lying so still for those few heartstopping moments had rattled her. 

“A drink?” The butler was at her elbow again.

She looked away from Buster. “Please.”

He handed her a martini glass with a little orange wedge on the side and sugar on the rim and she sipped, the spell of her own panic broken somewhat, though not for very long. Still more guests were filtering into the room. She recognized Marion Davies and Norma Talmadge with another thudding of her heart in her throat. The room seemed to be getting famouser by the minute. Buster was greeting guests a few yards away, sober and unsmiling, unaware that she was there. She wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d invited her. It seemed quite possible.

It was too much; she gave into her impulse to steal off to the loggia. Trying not to draw attention to herself, she stepped down into the recessed area, through an arched doorway, and into the loggia. White wicker furniture, potted trees, and pink orchids adorned it. Sconces on its inner walls burned with real flames, while two hanging fixtures gave a stronger light.

It felt a few degrees cooler outside. The sun had by now fallen and only a few streaks of purple remained in the sky. Nelly’s cocktail tasted of citrus, and she licked some sugar off the rim. The glow of the drinks hadn’t yet hit her. Too much scalloped ham in her stomach, she supposed. She stood next to one of the columns beneath yet another arched doorway and looked down what seemed like one hundred white marble steps, illuminated by carefully concealed electric lights, leading to the huge sunken swimming pool. The green lawn seemed to go on for miles. She still couldn’t get her head around the sheer excess of Buster’s abode. She remembered a two-reeler in which a down-and-out Buster, looking pitiful, stood in a bread line but was denied a loaf at the last minute. How humble and sad he had seemed!

“Hello,” said Buster behind her. 

She shuddered in surprise and turned around to see him walking toward her. “You always sneak up on me,” she said.

“Nelly.”

The split-second astonishment on his face told her two things. One, he hadn’t recognized her. Two, she looked as good as she thought she did. A sudden warm confidence renewed her. 

“What are you doing out here?” he said, stopping a few paces from her. He raised his own cocktail to his lips.

She took another sip of hers, deciding there was no point in not being honest. “I realized I was out of place and wanted some air.”

Buster looked at her appraisingly. He was wearing a well-tailored navy-blue suit and the flowers on his matching silk tie were embroidered in bright gilt thread. It was the prettiest tie she’d ever seen. “Thought you wanted fame and fortune,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “I want a job as an extra. I never said anything about fame and fortune.”

“What about your starring role in Shakespeare’s big talkie?” he said. Although he wasn’t smiling, it was definitely a tease. 

“I want the role. I hadn’t thought about what happens next,” she said, and it was true. She wanted to be an actress because she liked it. She wanted recognition for that acting, but it had never occurred to her, not seriously anyway, that recognition might lead to prominence or money. Now, among Hollywood’s elites in Buster Keaton’s extravagant mansion, anything seemed possible. Silence fell between them and she finished her cocktail. 

Buster said, “So what do you think?”

“Of what?”

“My house. The Villa.” He came to her side.

She met his eyes and was alarmed to feel a sort of flutter in her middle as they regarded each other. She thought of Natalie greeting her in the foyer and was disgusted with herself. “It’s, uh …” she said, distracted.

“Vulgar?”

“No, that’s not what I was going to say. I think it’s wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”   
  
“But it is vulgar. I think it’s wonderful as well, but it’s vulgar. You can say it.”

“If you insist,” she said, looking away from him. It was difficult to look him in the eyes now.

“You’re not being honest,” he said. 

For a panicked second, she thought he was referring to her feelings. But no, they were talking about the house. “I never thought you lived like this,” she said. “I guess I don’t know what I thought. I’m not used to it.”

Buster nodded. “You thought I was that honest boy from the pictures.”

“Well that’s how you seem when you’re working. I mean, when you’re filming a picture.”

He sipped his cocktail. “It’s expected,” he said, sweeping his hand to indicate the house. “When in Rome, you know.”

“Well I suppose that tells you that I’m out of place, that I’m not used to it.”

“C’mon, I’ll help you find your place.” He held out his elbow and she found she couldn’t refuse. She linked her arm in his before she was properly aware of it. His arm was warm and the material of his jacket was soft against her bare arm. He smelled like cigarettes and aftershave. Her mind protested,  _ Natalie, his wife Natalie _ . But she was powerless. They walked back up the steps to the recessed area, then up the other pair of steps to the checkerboard floor. The room was now noisy with conversation. A Victrola playing jazz could barely be heard.

Buster dropped her arm and stopped in front of Marion Davies and her male companion, who were near the  _ hors d'oeuvre _ table sipping drinks. “Nelly, this is Marion and Dick. Marion and Dick, this is Nelly.”

“How do you do?” said Nelly, blushing. 

With formalities out of the way, the lovely blonde-haired Marion asked with a polite smile, “And what do you do, Nelly?”

“I’m a theater actress. I worked with Buster on his last picture,” she said, the answer coming out just as smoothly as if she’d rehearsed it. 

More polite conversation commenced, and Nelly began to relax. This was one of her mother’s garden parties when she was a teenager and she was practicing her charm and manners with the adults, that was all. Sure it was artificial, but that was okay. 

As soon as there was a lull in the conversation with Marion and Dick, Buster spun her toward a nearby man looking to be about forty, slightly heavy with large, broad arms. “Clarence, Nelly. Nelly, Clarence.”

Clarence ended up being Clarence Brown, who had directed Norma Talmadge in  _ Kiki _ . Nelly told him that she had liked it and Buster said in a whisper, his breath hot on her ear, “Careful you don’t charm him too much, he just got divorced.”

Next, Buster turned her toward Jack Conway and his wife Virginia. She didn’t recognize his name and kicked herself for not paying more attention to title credits when Buster explained that he was Jack Conway the director. She had seen  _ Brown of Harvard _ , though, and was able to find common ground with him by telling him that she liked it. She was just starting to feel like she had established a good rapport with the Conways when Buster whisked her away again. She was now faced with Louise Brooks, sparkling like the dictionary definition of sex, and her date, a slim-mouthed man in a grey double-breasted suit who did not sparkle with anything. 

“Louise and George, Nelly. Nelly, Louise and George.”

“Call him Wet Wash,” said Louise, giggling. 

“She’s not his wife,” Buster whispered. Nelly swallowed at the feeling of his breath against her ear again. 

Again, Buster’s butler approached her and again she accepted a cocktail. This one was bright green and mint-flavored. Nelly hadn’t seen Louise Brooks in any pictures, but she’d seen her in plenty of magazines, so she expressed her admiration for Louise’s sleek, dark-brown bob instead. Louise received the compliment good-humoredly and asked Nelly what she did. Buster placed his hand on the small of her back. The weight of it was exquisite, but brief. He leaned over to say, “You’re on your own now, kid. I have to mingle.” Then he was gone.

“I’m a theater actress,” said Nelly. 

And Louise said, “Oh, what have you starred in?”

And pretty soon she was telling Louise about the humble Vista, the revues, and playing Helena and Maria like it was nothing.

  
  


It was suicide to be seen paying more than momentary attention to a girl in the presence of Nate and the two warships that were his sisters-in-law, but from the minute Buster saw Nelly out on the loggia, a vision in green, he couldn’t seem to leave her alone. There was no reason why he should worry so much about whether she was having a good time or if she spoke to the right people, but now that she was here, he felt compelled to look out for her. Maybe it was how drunk she’d gotten at that speak-easy. Without guidance, she seemed liable to slip and be swallowed up. Or maybe it was her unspoiled Midwestern ways, which reminded him so much of folks he’d known in Muskegon.

He wondered that he’d never noticed that her eyes were blue.

His sense of duty toward her became more powerful with every drink. He knew he’d suffer the consequences in the form of one of Nate’s jealousy attacks, but that punishment seemed far removed as his guests got drunker and their sense of abandon greater. Morning was far off and the night was still young. Now was a time to be happy about it all, to stop tormenting himself about how to make Nate happy and thinking about being saddled with twenty M-G-M gag writers who wouldn’t know funny if it high-kicked them in the forehead like Joe Keaton. He was with his friends in his palace, there was a pretty girl to charm, and life was okay.

  
  


Somewhere north of nine o’clock, Nelly was sitting in the family room on a settee opposite Louise and George, who were sharing a chair. Perched in George’s lap, Louise’s sparkle drew lots of men’s eyes, Nelly noticed. Of course, that sparkle had a lot to do with the shocking low cut of her dress and its promise to expose her breasts if she moved just a little this way or that. In spite of Louise’s glamor and unabashed provocativeness, Nelly liked her. She was down-to-earth, and they soon discovered a mutual love of books and music. Another citrus cocktail had been handed to Nelly by the butler at some point and the warm glow of spirits was finally upon her. She couldn’t remember why she’d been so worried about this party. She belonged perfectly.

Louise was in the midst of a story about her first feature roll which was to begin filming in Mexico the following month when Buster wandered over. It had been over an hour since Nelly had last seen him. She looked up expectantly, waiting for him to sit next to her on the settee. Instead, he moved closer and seated himself straight in her lap. 

“Buster!” she cried, trying not to spill what remained of her drink. 

He sprang up and looked at her lap, his brows knit in confusion. Then he sat next to her, folded his hands, and looked at Louise and George, as if unaware of his mistake. Louise laughed appreciatively and George smiled. Nelly tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help it. He really was funny, playing the boyish Buster she knew from the screen. 

“Oh. Nelly,” he said, as though noticing her for the first time.

“Buster,” she said dryly. 

“I don’t suppose you like to dance,” he said. He searched her eyes and nodded slowly, as if coming to an answer. “No, I don’t think you do.”

“What?” she said. Her cheeks were warm and there was a joke she wasn’t understanding.

“Go dance with him!” said Louise, laughing. “That’s what he’s asking.”

Buster responded with a mock pained look and opened his hands, as if to say,  _ Great, you just ruined it _ . 

Silently, he offered his elbow to Nelly, looking straight ahead and not saying anything, back to acting like one of his characters again. She took it and cast Louise a helpless look as he led her away. As they headed back toward the room with the checkerboard floor, she kept her gaze straight ahead. She didn’t want to risk catching any of the Talmadges’ eyes if they were around.

A medium-tempo jazz number was playing on the Victrola. Buster wasted no time in placing an arm around her waist and taking her hand in his. He led her onto the checkerboard floor where a number of other couples were dancing. She smelled whiskey on him where she hadn’t earlier and wondered if he was drunk. Buster hummed along to the song, which wasn’t one she recognized, but she liked the jaunty saxophone. He was a good dancer, nimble and coordinated.

She looked into his eyes and what she thought she saw there made her certain that she was in over her head. She quickly glanced away. She was getting that gay happy feeling she had the night at the blind tiger and wished to squash it. Natalie might be somewhere in the room and Buster was dancing with a girl other than his wife, so she had to have all her wits about her. 

_ Don’t you know who she is _

_ Looking right at me is _

_ Sugar _

_ My sugar _

She looked at Buster’s hand curled around hers. She’d never noticed how big his hands were for such a small man. Feeling the danger in it, she glanced back at his face. He was regarding her impassively. She dropped her eyes again.

_ Bees would not be buzzin’ _

_ ‘Round her if she wasn’t _

_ Sugar _

_ My sugar _

_ I declare that honey hasn’t got a thing on her, _

_ No sir! _

Buster hummed as he swanned her around the room. Nelly finally worked up the courage to look over his shoulder to see who else was in the room. To her relief, she saw none of the Talmadges, which could only mean that they were in the living room. She made a note to spend the rest of the night out here offering herself as a dance partner so she could avoid finding out how they felt about Buster inviting her to dance.

_ In conclusion therefore _

_ That is why I care for  _

_ Sugar _

She felt a little out of breath when the song ended. Part of her was relieved that they were no longer drawing attention to themselves and the other part was disappointed, especially when Buster released her hand and dropped his hand from her waist.

She started to thank Buster for the dance, but his attention was elsewhere. Her eyes followed his and fell on a man who wasn’t much taller than Buster, but seemed far bigger. Maybe it was the breadth of his most defining features: that distinctive cleft chin, the prominent nose and ears. Or maybe it was just the way he had loomed so large in her fantasies. 

“Well there’s your Don Juan,” Buster said softly, breaking the spell. “Won’t you go to him?” 

“Oh, I can’t,” she said, terror grabbing her.

Buster touched her chin and steered her face back to his. “Do you want to be in pictures?” He looked at her in an earnest way. 

“Yes.”

“Then let’s meet him.” He placed his hand lightly in the center of her back and walked her to the object of so many of her torrid dreams.

“Jack, this is Nelly. Nelly, this is Jack,” he said. 

To Nelly’s alarm, Buster melted off into the crowd and she was stuck staring up into John Barrymore’s face.“How do you do?” she said. Tremulous didn’t begin to describe how she felt.

He smiled. “How do you do?” His voice was deep and rich and aristocratic, exactly as she had imagined it. “Do you care to dance?”

She managed to nod and he pulled her close to him, guiding her in a waltz step as a slower number began. It was a new version of “In the Good Old Summertime” that she hadn’t heard before.

_ In the good old summertime _

_ In the good old summertime _

“And what’s your story, Nelly?” Barrymore asked.

Nelly felt like she might be drowning.

_ You hold her hand and she holds yours _

_ And that’s a very good sign _

In a daze, her cheeks flushed, she found herself telling him not about being a theater actress or working with Buster, but of playing Kate in the first talkie adaptation of  _ Taming of the Shrew _ . Unlike Buster, Barrymore knew Shakespeare back to front and she felt sure somehow that he would understand. He smiled and listened, the perfect gentleman. She explained that talkies were a natural fit for Shakespeare and would forever change the way audiences experienced him. All the while, the soft dreamy notes of the music carried them along. She had been gay and light-hearted before, but now she was overpowered by Barrymore’s sheer presence. He was strong, he was beautiful, he seemed a little dangerous. Maybe this is what real love felt like.

She was surprised when he released her hand and thanked her for the dance. The music had ended just like that. She felt as though she’d only been dancing for seconds.

Before she had time to do anything other than return his thanks for the dance, another man touched her shoulder. “May I have this dance?” he said in a refined English accent. He was about Buster’s size and quite handsome.

“Of course,” she said, taken aback. She was dizzy with the drinks and the encounter with Barrymore. She wanted nothing more than to retire to the washroom to touch up her face and memorize the details of her conversation with Barrymore, but it wouldn’t do to be rude to one of Buster’s guests.

The man grasped her waist and took her hand as a Dixieland jazz tune began. He smiled. He had full lips, blue eyes, and thick wavy hair that was turning white at his temples and forehead. In spite of that, he looked and sounded young. She tried to remember if she had ever danced with three such handsome men before in a single night.

“I’m Nelly,” she said. “A stage actress.” 

“You probably don’t need me to introduce myself,” said the man. His voice was light and cheerful. He bore forward and she stepped back, left foot, right foot, to the side. A tango. 

She didn’t recognize him at all, but guessed that he was a director. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are,” she confessed. “I’m pretty new to town.”

The man’s smile broadened. “You’ve really no idea?” He seemed delighted by this news.

Nelly smiled and shook her head. “Not in the faintest.”

“Shall I spoil it for you or do you like a mystery?” he said.

“I like one well enough,” she said, trying to remember her tango steps. 

“I’ll give you a clue. Clue starts with C.”

_ Beautiful changes in different keys _

_ Beautiful changes and harmonies _

“You’re charming,” she said.

“That’s not my name, but it’s a good guess.”

_ Watch that, hear that minor strain! _

The song changed tempo and they trotted across the floor. She was definitely out of breath now.

_ There’s so many babies that he can squeeze,  _

_ And he’s always changing those keys. _

She studied his face and shook her head again after a few seconds. “I can’t place you. Are you a director?”

“The first four letters were right,” he said, winking. “When you said ‘charming.’”

She spelled them in her head, C-H-A-R, and the penny dropped, along with her jaw. “I can’t believe it!” she managed. 

“It’s not often I get to surprise anybody,” he said, looking satisfied. 

She searched his face for hints of the Little Tramp, but couldn’t find them. “I never knew your eyes were blue. I thought they were brown.”

“One of my many secrets.”

“Well, you are a director. I had that right!” she said, and that made him laugh.

When the dance ended, Charlie Chaplin kissed her hand before releasing her and she felt truly like she was walking on the moon as she sought out of the washroom. It didn’t seem possible that this was her life. She relieved herself, then appraised herself in the mirror. It was scalloped and gold, with the names of famous Italian cities stamped around the edges, FIRENZE, GENOVA, ROMA, MODENA, VENEZIA. She was happy to see that her makeup was mostly bearing up under the dancing, but she touched up her lipstick and powder. Although she was a little flushed, she felt far more in control of her faculties than she had been the night of the blind tiger. There was great irony, she supposed, in the fact that she had felt out of place that night too. Whether in low company or high company, Nelly Foster managed to stick out. Her head whirled with the encounters she’d had over the past few hours, Marion Davis, Louise, John Barrymore, and Charlie Chaplin.

And Buster, the architect of it all. As she left the washroom, she wondered where he’d gotten off to. She hesitated in the corridor, reluctant to rejoin the revelers on the checkerboard floor or face the Talmadge clan in the living room. Once again, the loggia seemed the logical solution. She crept off to it, wondering what time it was. 

Unfortunately, the loggia was not a refuge. As soon as she stepped foot on it, she heard such blatant sounds of passion that sent her scurrying and blushing back to the room with the checkerboard floor. The front door seemed to beckon. There was a grandfather clock just outside the foyer that told her it was a quarter to eleven. The mere thought of the late hour made her yawn; she was accustomed to being asleep by nine-thirty each night. The night had been enjoyable and, all things considered, she had comported herself alright. It seemed wisest to call a taxi and quit while she was ahead.

“You’re not leaving?” said Buster behind her.

She startled again. “How do you manage to do that?” she said, turning around

“Do what?” He had a whiskey glass in each hand and was wearing a nonchalant expression.

“Oh, you know what,” she said. “And yes, I was thinking of it. It’s getting late.”

Buster cocked his head, indicating the front door. 

“What?” she said. He rolled his eyes in mock impatience and cocked his head again, wordless, playing his character. She followed him, her heart quickening as she followed him out the massive arched mahogany door and into the circle drive where the fountain splashed. She couldn’t imagine where they were going and why. He went left and led her past topiaries, then left around the corner of the house. Outside, it was dark and still. The leaves of palms waved above them and shrubs sheltered them from sight. Buster sank down in the lawn some feet from the marble steps of another loggia, this one with a squarish entrance.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he reached up and offered her one of the glasses. She took it and sniffed it. It was straight whiskey. Her stomach remembered the way it had felt coming back up that night in his hotel room in July and she hesitated.

“Did you get your break with Barrymore?” Buster said, looking up at the sky. 

Nelly set the drink in the grass and lowered herself carefully next to him. She had to return the dress the following day and would be responsible for any damage, including grass stains. “I didn’t get a chance to bring it up.”

Buster tilted his glass to his lips. “I can talk to him if you’d like. Or Sam Taylor.”

Nelly frowned though he couldn’t see her face well in the diffuse light coming from the loggia. She picked up the glass and swirled it, then plugged up her nose before she took a drink. All the same, the whiskey still burned going down. “Why are you being so nice to me?” she said at last. The question had been growing on her ever since he invited her to the party and, influenced by the cocktails, she wanted to know.

Buster took another drink. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?” He lowered his chin and looked off into the distance.

“Are you drunk?” she said. She didn’t have proof, but she was pretty sure she was more sober than him by miles.

“Does it matter?” he countered. 

The conversation wasn’t getting anywhere. “All I mean to say,” she said, “is that you don’t have to introduce me to your friends. When I called you the other day, I wasn’t expecting this. In fact, now I don’t think I ought to have called you at all. I ought to have just found a way to ask Mr. Taylor myself.”

“Everyone has an angle,” said Buster, knocking back the last of the whiskey. 

Nelly had not thought of herself as someone with an angle before, but there was some truth to his words, even though she didn’t like to admit it. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing these days?” he said. He pulled a flask from his jacket and refilled his glass.

The flask shocked Nelly a little bit, but she bit back a blunt remark and answered his question as if she didn’t notice. “Working on the United Artists lot. They put me in the prop department and I paint backdrops once and awhile. I’m hoping to get a part as an extra in the new D.W. Griffith. Anything they’ll let me do, really. It pays my rent fine.”

Buster  _ hmm _ ed _.  _ She saw that his hair was beginning to resist the lacquer he’d put in it and was coming loose, a curl here, a wave there. Likely it was the cocktails speaking, but she wanted to take the glass of whiskey away and stroke it. 

She followed his gaze. The Villa looked down into the soft, firefly-like glow of Beverly Hills. The light from the distant mansions wasn’t enough to dampen the stars, which hung white and clear overhead, peeping through the palm leaves. The grass was dewy beneath her hands and goose pimples rose on her arms as a breeze stirred. It was decidedly cool now. Although October in California felt nothing like the October in Illinois, there was something of autumn in the air. She shivered. It was like a scene out of a picture, Buster and his girl under the stars, dissatisfied because they hadn’t yet sorted out their misunderstanding. Then she gave herself a mental shake for being fanciful and romantic, reminding herself of how Natalie had welcomed her into the Villa earlier. This was her home just as much as it was Buster’s;  _ she  _ was Buster’s girl.

“Cold?” said Buster. 

She protested, but he was already shrugging out of his jacket. He arranged it around her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. His face was close as he tucked the jacket and she turned away. She reached for her glass and took another swallow of whiskey. She wasn’t ready to face her thoughts without more liquor on board. 

“Pretty dress, by the way,” said Buster, leaning back on an elbow. “Might be the prettiest one here.”

“Thank you. I rented it,” she said, warmth rising in her cheeks.

“Why?” 

She laughed. “Why? Why’d I rent it? Well to begin with, I’m not rich, and if you’re going to act, you need to look the part.”

“Are you acting?” said Buster.

She choked back another mouthful of whiskey and grimaced. “Sure I am.”

“What does your father do?”

It was an odd non-sequitur. “He’s in real estate,” she said. “Why?” The warm bloom of a proper drunkenness was settling on her.

“And he does pretty well for himself, I guess?” said Buster. 

“I guess.” She rolled the glass between her hands.

“You didn’t want for anything growing up?”

“No.”

“Most of those people in there, they didn’t grow up so well. We all just got lucky, that’s all. Right place, right time kind of thing. We’re just kids with a bunch of money, buying toys and palaces. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of around them. Everyone’s pretending just as much as you.”

She considered him, his face deeply shadowed in the feeble light. There was something dark and melancholic in his mood.

“Anyway, I should have told you to bring someone,” said Buster. “You would have felt a little better I bet. Do you have a steady?”

She shook her head, wondering what it meant that he was asking her if there was a man in her life. “No steady. And I did feel a little better, after you introduced me.”

“Good.” He tossed back the rest of his glass and scooted closer. “How was Jack Barrymore? Did he live up to your dreams?”

She grew hot and took another swallow of the biting liquor before answering. It was the second time he’d brought up Barrymore. The truth was, events had moved so fast she hadn’t had a chance to think about her encounter with Barrymore in any depth. And now that Buster was so distracting and near, she found it hard to think of Barrymore at all. “What makes you think he has anything to do with my dreams?”

“ ‘Cause you said so, that night I picked you up from the speak-easy. It’s alright, I won’t tell his wife. They’re getting a divorce, anyway.”

The joke felt cruel, the barb of it directed more at her than Barrymore and his wife. It made her feel ridiculous and scheming, ashamed of the dazed way she’d looked up at that singular face she’d only seen on screen, imagining that this could be her break, that she might be captivating him or falling in love. The worst of it was that it might be true. She did have an angle, possibly more than one. 

“That’s mean,” she said, looking out at the distant houses. 

“Well, it’s true. And I suppose you heard about Chaplin’s scandal, how he got soaked for almost a million in that divorce of his,” he said.

She acknowledged that she had. 

“I just hope Nate’s kinder to me when the time comes,” he said. 

She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”

His lips twisted in a bitter smile. “You can’t seriously think that we’re happy.”

“Nate?” she said.

“My wife. Natalie.”

“Oh.” The conversation had taken a dangerous turn and she finished her whiskey before saying, “I hadn’t thought about it.” Her heart thumped in her ears.

“Do you like me, Nelly?”

“Yes. Why?” She tried to sound casual, but wasn’t sure if she succeeded. 

She hazarded a glance at him, fearing what she might find in his eyes, but he was looking straight ahead again. What she didn’t dare say was that she liked the profile in front of her—the aquiline nose, the soft lips, the dark brows, the heavy-lidded eyes—better than Barrymore’s. She had for a while now, she realized.

Buster shrugged and pulled the flask out of his jacket again. Nelly, by now feeling the whiskey’s full effects, did something shocking without a single thought. She snatched it from his hand, raised her arm as high as she could, and flung it down the hill. 

“Hey!” said Buster, somewhat loudly.

“Shh,” she said. “We’ll be heard.”

“Don’t shush me, sweetheart, this is my party and I can drink as much as I like, you hear?”

He looked like such a mixture of things in that moment—bewildered, indignant, hurt—that she leaned in and kissed him.

He didn’t react. 

For a split second, she was sure that she had misread all of the signs she thought she’d noticed and was about to be in serious trouble with him. Then his hand was at the back of her neck and he was pulling her into a deeper kiss, nothing at all like the chaste, brief pecks he gave on screen. She threaded her hand in the shorter hair at the back of his head to keep him where he was. His arm came around her shoulders and she braced her free hand against his chest. She was thrilled to find that his heart was pounding.

“You shouldn’t drink anymore tonight. You’ll have an awful headache in the morning,” she said in a whisper, when he pulled back for a moment.

He kissed her again. The heat in her cheeks was rapidly starting to spread to other regions of her body. Now that this was happening, she didn’t have a single thought for anything but Buster. Her entire world had come down to him, and he felt too right for her to worry about morals or consequences. 

She leaned her forehead against his as they broke apart. His breath warmed her lips. He was looking at her silently and she looked back. Gradually, the world began to fade back in. She could hear a faint peal of laughter from within the Villa and she wondered how long it would be before someone would miss the host and go searching for him. 

“I guess we should go in,” she said, after a few moments of silence.

Buster looked at her. His finger traced the bow of her upper lip, then the seam of her mouth. When she parted her lips in response, he captured them again. She closed her eyes and cupped his cheek as her world narrowed back down to the sound of their kisses and his soft, needy exhales. It might have been just seconds or whole minutes before Buster jolted her back to reality with the press of his tongue against hers. She drew back, feeling light-headed, and he followed, biting her neck, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to tell her that this could get out of control quickly. The base part of her wanted that—very much—but the rational part of her mind was waking up. 

“We should go,” she said.

“We’re by my wing,” said Buster hoarsely. “There’s a staircase to my balcony. You could wait in my room for me until the party’s over. I’d get you out before morning.”

“We can’t,” she said, even as he was arguing against her neck with more gentle love-bites. 

“Why not?” His head went lower and his tongue outlined her collarbone.

“It’s dangerous. I bet your guests are already looking for you.”

Almost on cue, laughter echoed out from the area of the drive and the fountain. Aware that it could be the Talmadge sisters, Nelly took the opportunity to stand up and brush herself off before he could persuade her—and he was perhaps too close to persuading her. She’d lost track of the whiskey glass and whether she had finished what was in it. She was decidedly intoxicated. “C’mon,” she said. She stuck out her hand for Buster. He let her pull him up and swayed beside her for a moment, wincing and rubbing his forehead.

“Will you call a taxi for me?” she said. 

He reached out and touched her cheek, looking at her for a long quiet moment as if to memorize her. She noticed that his mouth was smudged in lipstick. 

“Oh dear. I got lipstick all over you,” she said. “Do you have a handkerchief? I don’t have mine on me. My handbag’s inside.”

“You and that damn bag, always leaving it behind.” He reached out and fished in the breast pocket of his jacket on her shoulders. 

She dampened the handkerchief with a little saliva and scrubbed at his lips. “Ow!” he said, frowning. 

“Don’t be a baby, it’s almost off,” she said, wiping at the corner of his mouth. She stood back. It was hard to tell because of the shadows, but she thought that she’d gotten most of it. “How do I look?”

Buster smirked, the first real smile she’d seen on him the whole night. “Defiled,” he said. “Better stay out here while I call that taxi.” He pressed her hand before he left, and she was alone with the most impossible tangle of thoughts, the foremost of which was that she wanted him to come back as soon as possible so that they could finish what they’d started.

She stepped into the loggia and sat down in the nearest chair. Stunned didn’t begin to describe her feelings. Buster’s jacket around her shoulders enveloped her in the smell of him, cigarettes and his own unique scent. Drunk, she was buoyed on a comfortable wave of happiness. She and Buster had done something daring, it was true, but in her heart’s core it was what she had wanted and she didn’t regret it a single bit. She’d only stopped it because she was afraid of being caught. Under normal circumstances, that thought would have alarmed her, but inebriated she could be honest with herself. It wasn’t to say that she didn’t get the thrill of a lifetime when she thought of her dance with Barrymore or even handsome Charlie Chaplin; she did. It seemed, though, that she had fallen for Buster without even knowing it. She shivered and not because of the chill in the air.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said, standing up and catching his hand when he reappeared a few minutes later.

He gave her hand a squeeze and passed over her bag, which he was holding. “I did you one better. Caruthers said he’d take you home. He’ll have the car ready in five.”

“Five minutes is a long time,” she said suggestively.

“Even I can’t finish that quick, honey,” he said, and she was glad he couldn’t see how brightly her face burned.

“I didn’t mean that you goose, I meant this.” She leaned in and kissed him again.

“Oh. Yeah, that,” he said. He pulled her against his chest and gave her a long, searching kiss. 

This time, Nelly didn’t pull away at the touch of his tongue; she met it and Buster groaned. With one hand, she stroked the fallen strands of hair at his forehead. “Thank you,” she said, when they broke apart. “Thank you for inviting me tonight.”

“Sure you won’t stay the night?” Buster said, kissing the corner of her lips.

“I’m not crazy,” she said.

“If you were, would you?” he said, drawing back to look in the eyes.

Her heart pounded. “Yes,” she said, after considering it. “I guess I would.”

He pulled her close and embraced her. She rested her cheek against his shoulder, thinking that she could stay here in his arms all night. Another burst of laughter and conversation came from the direction of the fountain. Car tires crunched on the gravel.

“We better behave,” Buster said.

“You’re probably right.” 

He released her and sat down in one of the chairs, and she followed his lead. He took her hand between both of his and they fell into silence. She wanted to tell him what the night meant to her, but couldn’t find the words. She looked out at the distant houses and up the stars, wondering if she’d ever get the chance to kiss him again or if she was just a passing fancy for a starry, booze-filled night. Too soon, there was the honk of a horn and Buster let go of her hand, standing up. “I think that’s your ride,” he said. They walked back to the drive, Nelly a few paces ahead of Buster, where a dark-colored Packard was waiting. Buster approached it and opened the nearest backseat door. He took her hand and helped her into the car. “Thanks for coming,” he said, after regarding her for a quiet moment.

She wanted to give him a parting kiss on the cheek, but couldn’t with his butler for an audience. “I had a beautiful night,” she said. “Thank you so much.”   
  
He gave her hand another quick squeeze and went around to the driver’s window, where he said to Caruthers, “Get her home safe.”

As the butler pulled away, she watched Buster walk back to the Villa. He didn’t turn around once, but continued until he reached the mahogany front door and slipped inside. Only then did she realize she was still wearing his jacket and had forgotten to check him for lipstick again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Soundtrack** : Red Nichols’ Stompers - “Sugar”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv53uQu-i1k  
> Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra - “In the Good Old Summertime”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVb8SYJ1pGI  
> Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra - “Changes”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCDpYi-_lHY
> 
> You don’t know how many times I’ve listened to these songs on repeat the past two months.


	14. Chapter 14

Buster caught it good from Natalie at breakfast the following morning. As soon as Connie collected the kids to wash them up and the room was empty, she let him have it.

He was made to understand that just before he reappeared inside the house after seeing off Nelly, Louise Brooks had exited the rear loggia, hair and dress rumpled and a nipple exposed, and dashed toward the bathroom. Natalie saw the whole spectacle and saw Buster too, strolling through the front door a minute later with a telltale smear of lipstick on his face. There wasn’t anything he could do to defend himself when she snapped, “I suppose you weren’t thinking about me at all when you went off with Louise last night? What everyone there would think?”

_ Oh, actually it wasn’t Louise, Nate, that was a crazy coincidence. It was this other girl, you see _ . Yeah, that’d go over like a lead balloon. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, after giving his answer some thought. “I really am. I had too much to drink. I didn’t know what I was doing.” There was nothing else he could say. Whoever had been out there with Louise, whether George or another lucky man, had either slipped back in unnoticed or left unnoticed, leaving good old Buster to take the fall. He wasn’t convinced that anyone had put two and two together concerning Louise and him, but that hardly mattered to Nate. All the elements to humiliate her had been in place.

“You say you care about me, but that isn’t true at all. Otherwise you wouldn’t be two-timing me every time my back is turned,” she said. Her beautiful eyes were shimmering with unshed tears and he did feel terrible looking at her. He wanted to comfort her, this woman he’d loved since the day he’d stepped off that train in New York and gone to seal their engagement, but he knew it wouldn’t do a lick of good, even if she had allowed him to gather her into his arms and hold her close, which he knew she wouldn’t. 

“You know about the two-timing,” he said. “I never lied about it.” He felt the futility of the argument as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“Yes, but you said it wouldn’t be  _ public _ ,” she said, breaking into a sob.

“Nate, I fucked up, alright!” he said. “I don’t know what you want. What do you want me to do, put on the hair shirt and get out the cat o’ nine tails? Jesus, I’m sorry.” He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. Now he was angry and couldn’t quite grasp why. Something to do with his stupidity and carelessness but also Natalie’s long-standing refusal to engage in the normal rules of marriage as he understood them. He was angry at everything. He shoved the chair so the arms struck the edge of the table, hoping they’d dented the table’s pristine finish, and stormed out. Eleanor was mopping the checkerboard floor and he ignored her meek hello as he jogged up the stairs and stalked into his bedroom. 

He yanked open his closet, pulled out a jacket, shrugged it on, and laced up his shoes. Before leaving, he collected his fishing poles and tackle box. 

He ended up driving out to Franklin Canyon Lake where he could be alone with his thoughts. He found an isolated spot and parked the Duesenberg, then set up. The absurdity of it didn’t escape him, sitting on the grassy edge of the lake getting the seat of his pants wet and dirtying up a $200 pair of leather shoes with a $9,500 car behind him.

He had been pretty drunk last night, but not so drunk he hadn’t known what he was doing when Nelly kissed him. She’d made the first move, but he’d been getting ready to beat her there. His thoughts had been returning to her all morning. He’d grown to like her and there wasn’t much question as to why. She was pretty for starters and she had a backbone, which he’d always liked in a girl. He was amused by her sense of pride. Her stakes also seemed very low. She didn’t want to be the leading lady in a romance or even the leading lady in one of his comedies, for that matter. No, it was fusty old Shakespeare she had her hopes pinned on. His first thought upon waking up, apart from lamenting how ferociously his head hurt, was that he wanted to see her again.

Nate’s sad, pretty little face at the breakfast table rose up in his mind and guilt gnawed. She deserved a husband who would be faithful to her; he did believe that with his whole heart, even though he couldn’t ( _ Couldn’t or wouldn’t?  _ hissed a part of him) make that sacrifice. It wasn’t fair of him to treat her the way he did, to be thinking of Nelly and how much he’d wanted her last night. Still, the selfish part of him objected stridently. He had needs too and didn’t he deserve to get them met? Hadn’t he tried his best to make things better before going outside of his marriage? Didn’t he still do his damndest to make Nate happy, what with the Villa and parties and letting her control the purse-strings?

The fishing was good as morning wore into afternoon and afternoon wore into evening, but he threw everything back. Gone were the days in Muskegon where Myra cooked everything he caught, frying the fish up in butter and cornmeal. Caruthers bought the fish and other meat fresh every day and it was usually exotic, skate fillets and swordfish and the like, not the humble trout and largemouth bass his line was currently fetching. When he tired of fishing, he got back in the car and drove home. He would miss dinner, but he wasn’t hungry. He parked in the garage and headed to the east wing, where he climbed the stairs to his balcony and let himself into his room, not wanting to come through the main entrance and risk encountering Natalie. He kicked off his shoes and tossed his jacket and trousers on the floor, and crawled into bed. The hangover had caught up to him and he fell fast asleep. 

When he woke up, he had no idea where he was or what time it was. It took him a few seconds to remember the fishing trip, the fight, and the party. He grabbed the alarm clock on his bedside table and brought it up to his face. Almost nine o’clock. He’d slept for over two hours. He sat up, feeling groggy and hungry, and pulled his trousers back on. He padded into the hall. The house was dim, Caruthers having turned down the lights for the evening, and no trace of the previous evening’s festivities remained. He wondered if Nate had decided to go ahead with the barbecue tomorrow in spite of the fight. Even though he would have rather inspected the kitchen for leftovers, he passed the stairs and went on to the west wing. The door to Natalie’s bedroom was closed and he tapped on the door to announce himself before pushing quietly inside. 

Natalie was sitting up in bed in a blue satin nightgown and a matching translucent wrap reading an issue of  _ Colliers _ . She didn’t look at him as he sat at the foot of the bed. “Hi,” he said, giving her toe beneath the covers a friendly tweak. She withdrew her foot and turned the page of her magazine. The cover advertised the new Zane Grey novel and was subtitled  _ A Story of Love and Adventure in Arizona _ . 

He knit his hands in his lap. “I know you’re angry.”

No response. 

“I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“I love you.”

Only then did Natalie put down the magazine and look at him. “A fine way you’ve got of showing it.” The expression on her face was cold.

He stood up and climbed into the bed with her, making himself comfortable against the mound of pillows on the vacant side. It was a risky move, but she didn’t object. “I wanna make things work.”

Natalie scoffed. 

Her king bed felt as big as a steamliner compared to his double. Even if he had been permitted to sleep in the same bed with her, with its size there would have been no danger of them ever touching.

“You know I still care for you. I’ve never stopped.” Cautiously, he stroked her arm.

“You humiliated me,” she said, not looking at him. 

“I know. I deserve to be castrated.” He didn’t think he deserved any such thing, but she was letting him stroke her arm, so he went on.

“Does the whole world know you’re stepping out on me? That I’m not enough for you?” Her voice was trembly. 

He sighed. “I don’t think anyone noticed last night. We came from opposite ends of the house.”

“Yes,” she said tearily. “It was very clever of you. But  _ I _ noticed.”

“Because you’re my wife. My wife who I love very much.” He threw caution to the wind and moved into her space, putting his arms around her and laying his chin on her shoulder. “I don’t want to lose you.” She was rigid, but didn’t attempt to pull away.

“What will it take for you to treat me with respect then?” she said, reaching up to dash away a tear. 

Buster sighed again and nuzzled her shoulder. She smelled of flowers and baby powder. “I do respect you. You know what the problem is.”

The silence between them was heavy. After a while, Natalie said, “I could try again to like it, I guess.” She sniffled.

He looked at her, surprised. “Do you really mean that?”

She nodded. “I want us to be happy. I want Bobby and Jimmy to have a mother and a father. Under the same roof, that is.”

Apparently he hadn’t been the only one with the D word on his mind. “Okay,” he said, not quite believing she’d just said what she had. “Well, you know that would make me very happy.”

Natalie laid her hand on his forearm. “And you’d stay faithful to me, if …” She was so delicate, she trailed off instead of naming the unseemly act to which they both referred.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“I don’t want to tonight,” she said, sounding almost frightened.

“I don’t expect you to.” He leaned up and kissed her cheek. “We can take things at your pace.”

“Okay,” she said. He felt her relax in his arms.

She permitted him to linger cuddling her a while longer, and when she kicked him out so she could sleep it was with a kiss.

Standing in the kitchen eating a shaved-beef sandwich a few minutes later, he felt like the tide was turning just a little. The cutting of  _ Steamboat _ was going well. The barbecue was still on for tomorrow and those always cheered him up. Natalie had done better than just forgiven him for his indiscretion, she told him she was willing to resume their marital relations. Even so, once he’d taken a bath and was lying between his sheets in his silk pajamas, he couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about the night before and the girl who had attended in her rented dress and had thrown away his flask of whiskey. He remembered too that she’d cried when he filmed the facade scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, Buster kittens, as I adjusted to some big life changes the past week. My therapy is this story, though, so I’m back at it again!
> 
> A couple notes: Buster and Natalie had servants called Connie and Eleanor, which is a little confusing given that Natalie’s sister Constance was sometimes called Connie and Buster found his happily ever after with an Eleanor. 
> 
> According to Myra Keaton, Buster never stopped loving Natalie, and I do think that he genuinely wanted their marriage to work. What do you think?


	15. Chapter 15

The day after the party, Nelly stayed in her apartment waiting for a phone call from Buster that never came. She left only to return the green dress, still smelling of Buster, to Carmela’s. His jacket hung on her coat tree. She buried her face in it and inhaled before she went to bed that night, and all of the sensations of the previous night flooded back in an intoxicating wave. 

The next day she went to work reluctantly. She knocked on her neighbor’s door as soon as she got home to see if anyone had called for her. They hadn’t.

A week passed without a call, then two weeks. She thought that Buster would at least want his jacket; it didn’t look inexpensive. But November went by with no call. 

It was a while before she could admit to herself how silly it had been to nurture the hope that the kiss with him had meant something. In hindsight, her naïveté was obvious. He was drunk, she was convenient, and since he couldn’t convince her to go to bed with him, that was that. It hurt her, of course. She’d replayed the memory of the night in her head countless times, how he’d led her to the grass and handed her the glass of whiskey, how delirious she’d felt when he bit her neck, how he’d held her hand on the loggia while they waited for his butler to bring the car. She felt sure she had not hallucinated the husk in his voice when he’d invited her into his bedroom. In the first few days following the party, the memory drove her crazy. Lying in bed or in the bathtub, she would pretend that her hand between her legs was his.

December came and went. She spent Christmas alone in the apartment, but it didn’t feel like Christmas with the sun shining and the temperatures hovering near seventy. She was used to the bleak December cold of Evanston, shopping with Ruthie and her mom in downtown Chicago as snow slanted down, stinging their faces, and the frigid wind bit through them. The opportunity to be in  _ The Battle of the Sexes _ never arose, but on the third of January she received a letter from the casting office telling her that she had been chosen as an extra in John Barrymore’s  _ Tempest _ . To say she was flabbergasted was an understatement. As she stared at the letter, she became more and more convinced that Buster was behind her turn of fortune. She couldn’t prove it. He was no longer near the United Artists lot, so she couldn’t ask him even if she wanted to—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her dashed hopes after the party had caused heartache enough and moving on was the sensible thing. Whenever she thought of him, she reminded herself that he was a married father and that even if things had gone further, it would have been to no end. The smartest course of action was to forget him and concentrate on the reason she’d come to California in the first place.

The first night of filming for  _ Tempest  _ came a couple of weeks later. First she and the other girls were buttoned into ball gowns made of sumptuous combinations of taffeta, chiffon, satin, lace, and beads. Her gown was of cream-colored satin, and a makeup woman twisted her hair into an intricate chignon with braids that undergirded the rest of her hair. A girdle pulled her waist to half its size and dainty beaded slippers with a modest heel rounded out the ensemble. Not since Buster’s party had she felt so ravishing.

When costume, hair, and makeup were in order, they were driven to the set in Studebakers with two rows of seats. It was now a quarter to six and dark. The girls gabbled in anticipation, but Nelly’s thoughts were in such a tumult that she was too distracted to join in. John Barrymore would be in that ballroom and she looked stunning. She wondered if he would notice her and if he did, how their conversation would go. Most of all she wondered whether she would feel anything toward him. There was no mistake that she had felt something the night that she had danced with him, though it had been eclipsed by her more potent encounter with Buster. Well, she had an angle with Barrymore and it was no better or worse than the angle Buster had played to try to get her into bed. If she was in the same ballroom as John Barrymore, if he chanced to recognize her, she would take advantage of it.

The palace ballroom was a breathtakingly huge set on the United Artists lot, every bit as real as the actual thing. The exterior was squarish and looked Roman in style, with an open-air stone porch and columns that were forty feet high. She and the other extras went up wide stone stairs through a set of towering arched double doors. Inside, there were ceilings even higher than the columns outdoors. A chandelier the size of a small elephant hung from the main ceiling. There were more columns inside, looking as big around as the sequoias she’d seen in her childhood schoolbooks. The ceilings and higher parts of the walls were adorned in frescoes and friezes. Candles burnt in candelabras affixed to the walls. On one end of the room was a bar and a long white table lined with countless glasses, a large, deep punch bowl, and a tub filled with ice and champagne. It was a dazzling sight.

Nelly knew a little bit of the premise of the film. Camilla Horn played a Russian princess. John Barrymore, a peasant turned military officer, was in love with her. The ballroom scene would be the first time they had met since Barrymore’s station in life had changed.

She located her partner Bradford standing against a wall with his arms folded behind his back. They’d been practicing for the past week in a large ballroom on the United Artists lot, and she was relieved that her average dancing skills had drawn no attention. Bradford was good-looking, brown-haired and of medium height, but she had noticed throughout their rehearsals that he was not interested in girls. There was no delicate way to convey to him that she had known many homosexual men back at the Vista and that it wasn’t a big deal to her, though she always tried to do her best to put him at ease. Still he remained stiff and aloof.

“Some place, huh?” she said.

“It’s something,” Bradford agreed, barely looking at her.

“Barrymore here yet?” she ventured. 

Bradford shook his head. “Haven’t seen him, but I don’t think Mr. Taylor’s here yet either.”

They fell into silence and watched everyone greet each other and the women compliment each other’s dresses. Bradford would never engage in more than small talk and Nelly was too excited to join in the other girls’ prattle. She liked them fine, but since she spent most of her time in the prop department, there was little opportunity for her to socialize other than in the canteen, where she listened quietly to the day’s gossip, having nothing to contribute herself and wanting to hear the latest lurid rumors. Barrymore’s marriage was indeed on the rocks as Buster had said and she found herself thinking about this fact more than was probably appropriate.

It was another twenty minutes before Barrymore and Camilla finally appeared, coming through a side door with Mr. Taylor and an entourage. Camilla was wearing a white satin gown with a full tulle skirt, a wrap to match, and earrings that brushed her shoulders. She looked every bit the princess she was playing. Barrymore was in black trousers, matching shiny knee-length boots, and a white officer’s coat with gold buttons. Her pulse quickened when she saw him and she wondered, not for the first time, if she could grow as fond of him as she had lately of Buster. 

However, she had no more time to be fanciful because Mr. Taylor was soon directing them to the dance floor, spacing them at intervals and telling them to remember what they’d practiced the previous days. Someone put a waltz on the Victrola. It played tinnily into the cavernous room and was soon swallowed by the sound of footsteps and rustling skirts. 

The first half hour was a thrill. Nelly relaxed, basking in the feeling of being in the midst of the greatest splendor Hollywood had to offer. All of the cameras were distant, focused on Barrymore who gazed penetratingly at Horn while she danced with a young officer and cast him contemptuous, conniving looks. There was no need to worry if she missed a few steps; trained on Barrymore and Camilla, the cameras could hardly have noticed. 

Camilla was the most beautiful woman in Hollywood that Nelly had seen yet, blonde, slender, and big-eyed with perfect Cupid’s bow lips. 

She could not have imagined how tiring the evening would become as the half hour wore into an hour, and the hour dragged into a second. After performing endless dances with Bradford under that dizzingly high ceiling, having always to smile and look gay, she was hot and thirsty and hungry. Her feet were swollen in her delicate shoes. Though the extras were permitted short breaks every half hour, the communal pitchers of water weren’t sufficient to quench everyone’s thirst and they were forbidden to touch the plenitude of spirits laid out in the tub and on the long tables draped with white tablecloths. The beer, champagne, and other drinks appeared to be for Barrymore’s benefit alone. One scene had him standing at the bar with cameras grouped around as he drained glass after glass. He appeared to be drinking the real thing. She could steal looks at him, but only over Bradford’s shoulder and they couldn’t be long lest she spoil the scene. 

Around the third hour, now close to ten o’clock she guessed, she ceased to care about Barrymore at all. He had by now moved onto the floor with Camilla and the Victrola was trying to be heard over the dancing again. Nelly had only mind for her thirst and exhaustion. She wondered how much more of it she could take. Her lips were chapped and her smiles now felt more like grimaces. Bradford’s eyes looked glazed, though his steps were as sure and strong as ever.

Suddenly, there was a little shriek, a cry of “ _ Mein Gott _ !, and the echoing sound of something hitting the floor. Bradford stopped and so did Nelly. They followed the other dancers’ eyes to the center of the room. Camilla was sitting on the floor on her behind wearing a look of shock and looking like an upended wedding cake in her disarranged white dress. The cry had been hers. Barrymore was on his hands and knees, laughing and trying to get up. One of the male dancers had to assist him, and when he was on his feet again he swayed. There was no disguising that he was really drunk. After two male extras had helped a ruffled-looking Camilla to her feet, he reached for her waist and again lost his balance, almost taking them both down again. She couldn’t say why, but Nelly was seized by the conviction that Buster had warned her that John Barrymore was like this.

Bradford dropped Nelly’s hand, clearly sensing that this was more than a momentary disruption. Mr. Taylor appeared, standing between the two parties and talking to them and his crew, his face serious. Someone brought a chair for Barrymore and he sat heavily in it. His face looked red. A few of the other dancers attempted light conversation as if the spectacle in front of them wasn’t taking place, but Nelly had no energy to pretend she was interested in anything else. The reprieve from dancing was a blessed relief.

Little by little, chatter began to filter back to Bradford and her: Barrymore was indeed drunk as a skunk and to avoid the cost of reshooting the scene on another night when he was sober, Mr. Taylor was trying to come up with a solution for him to finish his dance with Camilla.

“I need to sit down before I faint,” Nelly said. 

Bradford nodded as if barely hearing her. The pitchers of water had been brought out again, so she grabbed a glass, filling and draining it twice. After the edge was gone from her thirst, she walked to the coatroom to find her handbag, keeping the glass so she could refill it in the washroom.

The washroom was empty save for one other girl. Nelly used the toilet and set to touching up her makeup once she’d washed her hands and had another two glasses of water. Somewhere in the echoing hall outside of the washroom, a clock chimed the half hour and she remembered standing in Buster’s foyer looking at his grandfather clock. Vaguely, she wondered if every famous man in Hollywood drank as much as Buster and Barrymore and, if so, what they were trying to escape from. 

She was carefully coating her lips in Vaseline to address the fine cracks that hadn’t been there three hours earlier when  _ he _ came in, blundering through the door like an ox.

“Mr. Barrymore!” she said, utterly amazed to see him.

“Oh, hello. Jack, please,” he said, as if he hadn’t just walked into the women’s washroom. His cheeks were rosy with color and his gait was unsteady. 

He stumbled to one of the sinks and she watched in disbelief as he fumbled with the buttons of his trousers. Before she had time to do much more than look away, he was urinating into the sink. She couldn’t seem to move.

“What the hell are you doing in the men’s lavatory?” he said, swaying in her peripheral vision. 

Her face was hot. “Sir I’m sorry, but it’s the ladies room,” she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead. 

The appalling sound of urine splashing into the sink seemed to go on for hours. “Why in the hell would they have urinals in the ladies room?” Barrymore boomed. 

She didn’t like the sense she was getting, one of being around a powerful, dangerous animal. “Sir, they’re sinks.”

“I’ll be damned.” In the corner of her eye, he shuffled and ran the tap. He had finished urinating.

Her thoughts went back to their dance at Buster's party. She’d had a drowning sensation then and had considered whether she might be love-drunk. That feeling seemed very far away now. She looked over and he was picking his nose in the mirror, wiping the contents on its edge. She couldn’t believe she was seeing what she was seeing.

“We met at Buster Keaton’s party in October,” she said, because she was embarrassed and could think of nothing else to say.

“Did we,” Barrymore stated, sounding disinterested as he peered into the mirror.

“Yes,” she said. “We danced and I told you about wanting to star in a talkie of  _ The Taming of the Shrew _ .”

He narrowed his eyes, as if struggling to remember it. The approaching sound of giggling and the subsequent appearance of two extras through the door saved her just then.

“Mr. Barrymore!” said one of the extras, looking bewildered.

“By Jove, this  _ is  _ the ladies room!” said Barrymore. He’d finished picking his nose and was propping himself up with one hand on the sink.

“He was confused,” said Nelly. “We should take him back to Mr. Taylor.” A little voice in the back of her head asked why she was bothering to defend him at all. “Come here.” She took him by the elbow and gestured to one of the other girls to do the same. He stank of booze and she thought she caught a faint whiff of urine as they led him down the hall and back through one of the sets of arched double doors. She was no longer awed by him. Rather, she wanted to dispose of him as fast as possible. 

In the crowded room, Nelly located Sam Taylor by searching out Camilla’s distinctive white dress. She and the two extras led Barrymore to them. Mr. Taylor raised an eyebrow when they approached.

“I think he needs an eye kept on, sir,” Nelly said, her arm still in Barrymore’s. 

“Found me in the fucking ladies room!” said Barrymore, chuckling.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Taylor. Nelly could tell he was trying not to betray his annoyance at Barrymore. 

She could have stayed and offered more of an explanation, increasing the director's chances of remembering her face, but she’d had enough of playing angles and wanted to get as far away as possible from the dangerous animal that was John Barrymore. As soon as she found Bradford again, she poured out her entire tale. 

“He’s a pig!” she concluded. 

“Good God,” said Bradford, making a face. She wondered if he had found Barrymore as handsome as she once had and was now reconsidering. 

“You’re telling me.”

“They’re building him a sort of carousel now in the courtyard for him and Miss Horn to sit on since he can’t stand straight,” Bradford said. “They’re going to film the dance that way.”

“Looks like we’ll be here all night,” said Nelly, her spirits sinking. If she had gone back in time and told the Nelly Foster of last July that the idea of spending prolonged hours in the same room as John Barrymore would cause her intense dread, she wouldn’t have believed herself for a minute. 

Her prediction turned out to be true. The clock chimed one before Mr. Taylor had the footage he wanted. Nelly was surprised that the carousel hadn’t made Barrymore vomit, but although he swayed off in the direction of the washrooms several times more, he kept down whatever he had drunk.

She piled into one of the Studebakers with the girls and fell asleep for the brief duration of the ride. Back at the United Artists costume shop, she degowned, redressed, and shoved her aching feet back into her own shoes. She lined up for a streetcar with the other girls and sank wearily into a seat when it opened its doors. It was another forty-five minutes before she was home. By now the hour was two a.m. and she had to be up at five-thirty to catch a tram in time for her seven a.m shift in the prop department. She felt like Perrault’s Cinderella, but the magic had vanished before midnight and she was, all in all, relieved to be among her rags and ashes again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can watch _Tempest_ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stHrKt4gwO8
> 
> John Barrymore really did get so drunk during the ballroom scene that he couldn’t stand. “And when we were dancing together in one scene, he fell down with me on the floor because he was so drunk. So they had to build a carousel affair for us, it was a sort of criss-cross arrangement, and we put our arms around each other, looked deeply into our eyes and somebody moved the carousel around so it looked in the film as if we were lost in each other’s arms.”
> 
> -Camilla Horn quoted in Tony Villecco’s _Silent Stars Speak: Interviews with Twelve Cinema Pioneers_ (McFarland & Company, 2001) 32. 
> 
> The same page also quotes Priscilla Bonner as saying that Barrymore picked his nose all the time and his face got red with blotches when he was drunk. I did read somewhere too that he once stumbled into the women’s room by accident. 
> 
> Fun fact: Buster’s later paramour Dorothy Sebastian was originally cast in Camilla Horn’s role!
> 
> This chapter was the one that was giving me all the trouble, but it turned out okay once I did a little reading up on Barrymore.


	16. Chapter 16

The first week of December, Natalie arranged for a photographer to come to the Villa to take their portraits so that Beulah Livingstone could do a write-up in a magazine. The photos would be shared far and wide, showing the world Mr. and Mrs. Buster Keaton’s fairytale life in Hollywood.

Beulah thought it would be cute to set up a kid-sized Christmas tree outside of the boys’ playhouse. The boys were given wooden trucks and cars as early gifts. Buster and Natalie sat in folding chairs while the boys hung gobs of silver tinsel and ornaments on the branches. Bobby was too young to see the production for what it really was, but to his credit, Jimmy smelled a rat. He knew you didn’t trim a tree and get toys before Christmas Eve, and Buster watched him go mechanically through the motions of admiring the toys and decorating the tree. Buster, who had a hangover, found himself hating every contrived second. It wasn’t that he objected to getting pictures taken with the kids and Nate, it was the burlesque of it all. It was a Talmadge thing to do, a Peg thing to do, and he was just about sick of that. He didn’t like his private business in the public eye and he didn’t think it was good for the kids, either. 

“Let’s get some of the mister and missus,” Beulah said to the photographer, after she was satisfied with the shots of the tree-trimming and toys.

“I’ll change then,” said Natalie. “Just a moment.”

“Why?” said Buster. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with what she was wearing, a triple string of pearls and a light green dress with a dainty bow at the neckline. Mostly, he just wanted to get rid of Beulah so he could get on with his day.

“Well I’d like to wear something a little nicer,” she said, giving him a smile that was a frown in disguise.   
  
“Well I’ll help you pick something then.”

Natalie didn’t look happy at this pronouncement, but there was no way he was sticking around to make small talk with Beulah. He took Natalie’s arm and strolled up the lawn with her and into the house.

“I would prefer you wait downstairs,” Natalie protested, as he followed her up the stairs to the west wing. 

“Oh no,” he said. He was in a perverse, restless mood. “This is what husbands and wives do, help each other out, spend time together. Ain’t that what the magazine story’s about?”

“You are being cynical,” she said in a low voice, frowning at him. They went down the hall past the kids’ rooms and into her inner sanctum. 

“Who, me?” He sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, feet dangling as Natalie disappeared into the vast room that held her clothing. She didn’t answer and he heard the sound of hangers being slotted around. He looked around the room. It was cool and fresh-smelling, its walls a light taupe and hung with portraits of the boys and her sisters. On a little table near a south-facing window, there was a framed photo of them on their wedding day. In the picture, he was holding his white cuffs and looking sidelong at Natalie, and she was laughing into the camera, the ribbons on her bouquet streaming to the ground. He didn’t remember the moment, but guessed he’d taken the cuffs off to make her laugh. He had loved making her laugh. 

“Is it really all just for show?” he said. 

“What?” she said.

He could hear the susurration of expensive fabrics. “The photos.” He meant the magazine photos, though it occurred to him that he could just as well have meant the photo on the little table.

“Of course not,” she said, her voice just on the side of too bright. She’d always been a bad liar. 

He hopped off the high bed and walked to the doorway of her closet, if such a colossal room could really be called a closet. She had undressed down to a white silk slip over a girdle and looked alarmed at his appearance. 

“Don’t lie,” he said.

Her lips tightened. “You know very well that I’m trying my best.” 

Now that was absolutely a fib. Sometimes she’d let him get to second base, but he was just as likely to win his studio back as get a runner on third, and forget home base. He’d had that familiar itchiness lately, but he’d kept his vow in October to stay faithful, even though there were temptations aplenty at all the parties she dragged him to.

He closed the space between them and cupped her cheek. “C’mon. You know that isn’t true.”

“Buster, not now. Not like this.”

Her voice had a shrill edge and he realized with a deep, searing pain that he was frightening her. He hadn’t been trying to seduce her, he’d just wanted an honest answer out of her.

He withdrew his hand, looking at her incredulously. “You think I’d force you?”

She turned her head away, but he’d already seen it in her face. She thought him capable of a desperate, despicable thing like that. 

“I just don’t care for it,” she said in a small voice. 

He couldn’t believe it. “You think I’m such a beast, such a sex-crazed brute that I’d—”

“Stop it!” She turned back to him, her eyes flashing. “Stop it at once!”

“Stop what?” he said. “I ain’t doing nothing.”

“You know perfectly well what you’re doing!” she said. “I arrange for a nice day and ever since you got up this morning you’ve been determined to ruin it. Well, consider yourself successful.” She ripped a pink dress off a hanger. 

“A nice day? Whose idea of a nice day? With that phony out there, Beulah?”

Natalie pulled the dress over her head and wriggled it down her hips, saying in a cold voice, “The children are enjoying it.”

“Jimmy isn’t. And Bobby’s too small to know better. You really want ‘em growing up this way? Thinking everything they do’s gotta be for show? That they get whatever they want whenever they want it? Christ, would you just think about it for a minute?” he said, now as angry as her as she was at him.

“Stop it!” she said. “Just stop it!”

“Not until we sort this out,” he said, standing persistently near her.

Natalie tugged the dress in place around her hips and reached back to do up her buttons. “I have nothing to sort out. You’re the one who started this whole business.”

“Oh, it was me who had the big idea about the separate beds, was it? Well that’s news to me,” he said.

Natalie huffed. “It’s back to that again, is it?”

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said.

She tilted her chin at him defiantly. “It wouldn’t be if you weren’t so obsessed with it.”

He’d never once been violent with her, but the remark made him want to strike her. Now he was the one who felt frightened. At any other time he would have argued that he wasn’t obsessed, but he didn’t trust himself. He stepped back from her. “You know what?” he said, hardly hearing his own words. “Go on ahead with Beulah, just you. I’ll see you later.”

Her protests followed him into the hall, but he didn’t turn around, still not trusting himself. He went out the front doors and walked straight over to Tom Mix’s, feeling pale and angry.

Tom was surprised to see him. “Long story,” Buster said, inviting himself inside.   
  
Tom seemed to understand and pulled a chair up for him in the kitchen. “Game of gin rummy?”

“Only if you’ve got the gin to go with.”

Tom rummaged in a cabinet and came out with a bottle, grinning.

“Good. We got ourselves a game.”

With a little gin and Tom for company, Buster was soon happy again—or if not happy, then able to forget the disagreement with his wife.

Nothing more was said afterwards about resuming their marital relations. They carried on as they had since Bobby was born. They entertained guests. He was home in time for dinner. They retired to separate wings at bedtime. On Christmas Day, the Talmadges bustled into the Villa with all their noise and gaiety and gossip, and he sat quietly back, playing the meek husband. Natalie gave him gifts and he gave some in return. That afternoon, he took the boys over to Myra’s house where the gifts were less extravagant, but they seemed nonetheless pleased with them and their decidedly unglamorous aunt, uncle, and grandmother.

Whether out of loyalty to her or a contrary need to prove her wrong, he stayed faithful to Natalie into January. She’d kicked him back to first base again. Even then, she never seemed to want to play ball. As the time to sign his contract with M-G-M drew closer, he wondered how long he could behave himself before he cracked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep in mind that this is all just fiction, readers! I think Buster and Natalie look perfectly happy in the Christmas images; he even has a half-smile on his face in one. As far as I have been able to tell, the photo shoot took place in December 1928 not December 1927, but I think it fits.


	17. Chapter 17

The canteen at United Artists buzzed with the news of the scene that John Barrymore had made in the ballroom while filming  _ Tempest _ . For once, Nelly had something to contribute. Over a dozen times, she told her story of him blundering into the washroom and pissing in the sink. She omitted the detail of his nose-picking, as it seemed unnecessarily spiteful. Perhaps she was still loyal to her past infatuation with him, which was now wholly gone. Regardless, her story was still a hit. 

It took a couple of days for the canteen chatter to return to the usual: who was straying from their marriage or thinking about divorce or both; who had been seen at a party or a restaurant or a premier; who had been drop-dead drunk and fallen from grace. The other extras felt smug that the stars were mortal and not gods, and although she enjoyed the gossip just as much as anyone, Nelly didn’t feel superior. It was no revelation to her, especially after encountering John Barrymore in the washroom, that Hollywood types were covered in warts if you looked closely. She thought of what Buster had said about many of them not growing up well and being like children who had been handed palaces and toys. Even though he did live in a palace, Buster felt more down-to-earth, a man she might have met anywhere. She’d felt comfortable with Louise Brooks and Charlie Chaplin too. 

Occasionally, the canteen talk was more useful, involving buzz about films that were rumored to be in the offing. On Thursday morning at eleven, Nelly heard something that stopped her heart and then broke it. She was eating a chicken salad and half listening to her neighbors, half thinking about the props she needed to organize for an upcoming scene of Norma Talmadge’s new picture  _ The Woman Disputed _ , which was nearing the end of filming. Every time she thought of the film, she thought of Norma. That caused her to think of Natalie, which in turn led her to think of Buster. Even though he was with another studio and she hadn’t seen him for nearly three months, scarcely a day went by where she didn’t have cause to remember him.

“...  _ Taming of the Shrew _ ,” said her neighbor, a pretty brunette with a bob and a snub nose, and Nelly was suddenly paying attention just as though someone had said her name directly. Shakespeare was not a topic of conversation that typically came up in Hollywood, and when it did it was always  _ Hamlet _ or  _ Macbeth _ or  _ Midsummer _ .

“Excuse me, could you say that again?” she said to her neighbor.

“I was on set yesterday with Mr. Taylor and he was saying his next big film’s called  _ Taming of the Shrew _ . It’s Shakespeare or something. What a queer title, don’t you think? Why’d you want to tame a shrew?”

Nelly was too excited to explain the particulars of rodents versus unruly women. “When’s he casting?” she said, feeling breathless. 

“Well God knows that,” said the extra. “He’s gotta finish with  _ Tempest _ first, doesn’t he? But he says Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are the leads, so it must be a romance. Lord, I’d give my right ear to be in a film with her.”

Nelly could almost feel the shattered halves of her heart drop into the space beneath her rib cage. Her stomach burned. She murmured some meaningless rejoinder and let others around her pick up the threads of the conversation. No one noticed when she got up and left, her chicken salad half uneaten. 

Coming to California, all of her hard work, had been pointless in the end. She’d never stood a real chance of making it onto the screen in a leading role; even the other extras were prettier, slimmer, and more experienced, and they weren’t the main competition when it came to actresses. Somehow, she’d never thought anyone would think to make  _ The Taming of the Shrew  _ without her, though.

She found herself back in the prop department, going through her work like an automaton all while feeling as if a family member had just died. Well, a dream had and it was just as dear to her. It was all she could do to make it through the day without crying, but when she arrived home she found that she was too numb to let the torrent burst forth. She sat on the sofa in her apartment as the news sank in. The trajectory of her life had come into a new and painful focus. She was not to have success in pictures. Here she was, twenty-six, unmarried, no children, no career; in short, not a thing to show for her time on the earth. Worse yet, she was now all but certain that Mr. Taylor had gotten the idea from John Barrymore. Where else would it have come from?

Besides Barrymore, not a single other soul in the world knew what the dream had meant to her except Buster. She still had his number from back in October. It was written on a curled piece of paper in Bert’s handwriting and hidden in her underwear drawer, and she never considered calling it until now. The rational course of action would be to let the storm blow over and the sun reappear from behind the clouds, but she was so miserable that once the thought of Buster was in her head, she couldn’t help herself. She stood up and went into her bedroom. The paper was tucked toward the back of the drawer beneath a black silk lace chiffon chemise she’d never worn before. She told herself that it was humiliating to run to Buster and throw her little fit, yet she was in the hall outside the apartment dialing his number before she had the chance to reason herself out of it. 

The line rang and rang and rang some more. 

With every second he didn’t pick up, her misery increased. Friendless, talentless, foolish, hopeful Nelly. She was seconds away from hanging up when there was a click on the other lines and a voice, sounding harassed, said, “Hello?”

“Is this Buster?” she said. 

“Yeah?” said the voice.

“It’s Nelly.”

There was silence and evident confusion on the other end. “Oh. Well, how are you?”

A hot, mortified flush went through her. How stupid it had been to call him and involve him in her silly problems. She’d probably interrupted him in the middle of something important.

“You know what, it’s not anything important,” she said hastily. “I’m sorry I called. I don’t want to bother you.”

“Well you can’t do that to me. Now I’m interested,” said Buster. 

“No, it’s stupid. I just didn’t know who else to tell,” she said. 

“Spit it out.” 

She took a deep breath. “I just found out that Sam Taylor is directing  _ Taming of the Shrew _ ,” she said. “He’s cast Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the leading roles already. And I think—oh, this is so stupid—I think that John Barrymore gave Mr. Taylor the idea. I’m sure I gave John Barrymore the idea. I told him all about it, the night of your party. And—” To her distress, her voice cracked.

There was silence on the line. “Oh,” said Buster, his voice gentle and soothing. “You poor kid. So someone’s gone and taken your dream?”

“Yes,” she said. She fought to swallow back the tears and steady her voice. “Anyway, you’re the only one who knew … and I thought—but I told you it was stupid. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know who else to tell.”

Buster’s next words nearly knocked her over. “Where do you live? I can be right over.”

“No, no, you don’t have to,” she said hurriedly.

“No, I’m coming over. What’s your address?”

“Genesee Avenue, but don’t. You don’t have to.”

“What number?”

“401, but please—”

“Great. I’ll be there in about a half hour.” The line clicked again and he was gone, likely having realized she was about to try to argue him out of it. 

She sniffed back her tears and looked around the apartment in a daze, forced to set aside her despair as she considered the state of her home. Neatness had never been one of her talents and there was dirty laundry all over the floor, used cups stacked on top of magazines, and stacks of books everywhere. First, though, she needed to address her makeup. The sob had smeared her mascara and eyeliner, so she reapplied those and touched up her lipstick. Her hair had a few flyaways, but she judged it acceptable. The beige cotton day dress with the green and red dice pattern could have been fancier, but there were dishes and laundry to worry about and she didn’t have time to try on outfits to see which one worked best. She filled a sink with soapy water and did a quick job of cleaning three days’ worth of plates, silverware, and cups. Running short on time, she dashed around the living room next picking up slips, dresses, and stockings. She’d cleared most of them when she heard a distant knock. Her heartbeat rose in her throat.

She slipped out of the apartment and hurried to the front door before any of her neighbors could investigate. When she opened it, Buster was standing there in a pale yellow jacket over a white collared shirt. He gave a slight smile when he saw her. She was simultaneously reassured and distressed by the sight of him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“Stop it,” he said, as he stepped over the threshold and she closed the door behind him. “Quit apologizing.”

“Okay,” she said. She brushed past him and took the short hall to her front door. Buster followed. Inside, she motioned for him to sit on the sofa. “I’m sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”

“What’d I just say about apologizing?” Buster said. He sat on the sofa, putting his elbows on his knees and knitting his hands. “So tell me about your bad news.”

Nelly hovered next to the sofa, uncertain of how to conduct herself. She was unable to forget that the last time she’d seen Buster, they had engaged in some rather serious kissing and he’d asked her to spend the night with him. There seemed to be no trace of that romantic mood left in him now. “Do you want any coffee? Tea?” she said. “I can make some.”

Buster shook his head. “I want you to sit here and tell me what’s happened.” He patted the cushion next to him.

She felt shy, but didn’t dare disobey. She took a seat beside him, leaving a polite space between them, and began pouring out her tale. In truth, there wasn’t much to say. Fairbanks and Pickford were shoe-ins and her chance to make movie history was down the drain. 

“I don’t know what I do now,” she said after explaining what she’d heard in the canteen, the despair creeping up on her again. “I wasted all this time for nothing. I was so stupid to think I’d get anywhere. You told me from the very beginning I wasn’t leading-lady material and I ought to have listened. I feel awful.”

“It’s a tough business for everyone, never mind me putting my foot in my mouth that one time,” Buster said. “What about trying out for one of the other parts?”

Nelly shook her head. “There’s Bianca. That’s it. Even if I wanted the part, I don’t have any experience. Acting in pictures, I mean. I’ve been an extra for you and in John Barrymore’s new picture. That’s all.” Her eyes welled with tears as she wondered what it had all been for. There was no place for a girl of average looks who was twenty pounds too heavy. No place for an old maid. The tears wobbled in her eyes and spilled.

Buster rummaged in his trousers pocket and handed her his handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she choked out. She blew her nose and blotted her eyes, leaving behind smudges of eyeliner and mascara on the clean white fabric. “I was so damn stupid. I shouldn’t have said a god damn thing to John Barrymore. It was hubris.”

Buster patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s a rotten business.”

She wept at his words, shielding her face with the handkerchief. 

“Now c’mon. Don’t do that. C’mere,” said Buster. 

She shook her head, but he pulled her to him and gathered her in his arms. She gave up and buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m so stupid,” she said into his shirt. As she cried the rest of her tears he continued to hold her, rubbing her back and putting his chin in her hair. 

“If it makes you feel better, even people who’ve been in the biz since the beginning don’t always get what we want,” said Buster. “I just lost my studio.”

“I know,” she said, sniffling. “Bert told me. It’s not fair to you, either.” Her tears soaked into his shirt.

Buster’s chin on her head and his touch on her back were comforting. Although she was in the grip of despondency, the caresses were making her feel just a little like things might be okay after all. 

“I’m glad you called,” he said, when the hitches in her chest began to lessen. 

“Why?” she said, straightening up and breaking his hold on her. She turned her face away. She could feel it was hot and blotchy and knew she’d cried off half her makeup. She blew her nose.

“I’ve been thinking about you, Nellie Dean.”

She dabbed at her face with the cleaner edges of the handkerchief and hazarded a glance at him. “What?”

“Since my party.”

She couldn’t tell what his expression meant. “What do you mean?” she said, feeling dumb. 

“ _ A pretty girl is like a melody / That haunts you night and day _ ,” he sang, with a silly smile.

She laughed at his absurdity and wiped her nose with the handkerchief. Her mood was suddenly lighter by half. He was telling her he hadn’t forgotten her. “Buster Keaton, are you making love to me?” 

He nodded. “C’mere.”

She shook her head. “I look like an utter fright, my nose is stopped up, how can you possibly want—”

“Shh,” he said. He tugged at her arm and she couldn’t resist.

She fell against him and he took her face in his hands. The kiss was long and searching. The taste of his mouth was familiar and reassuring, and the melting sensation she felt was the same, too. She’d given up hope of this ever happening again and felt beyond giddy now that it was. She leaned into him and put her hands on the back of his neck. After a minute or so, he removed his hands from her face and clutched her to him. Their thighs pressed together as they kissed.

Too soon, Nelly had to pull back. “My nose is still stopped up,” she said with a laugh. She turned away and blew it again.

Buster reeled her back into his embrace as soon as she’d finished. This time when he kissed her, he slid his hand up her knee and under her dress. He bypassed her stocking, stopped on her bare upper thigh, and squeezed, his hand warm and emphatic. Thrilled, Nelly insinuated her hands beneath his jacket to rest on his back as his tongue met hers. She knew that they couldn’t go further—she had her little friend visiting—but she found him hard to resist. He made her forget that she would never have success in pictures and that she currently looked like a fright. Feeling bold, she dropped one hand to the rear waistband of his trousers and tugged his shirt and undershirt out so she could put her hand against the warm skin of his back. 

Buster made a noise in his throat and pulled back, withdrawing his hand from her dress. He was considering her in that silent, serious way that he had. When she went to touch his face, he caught her hand. He planted kisses on her palm, then put her hand on his cheek and held it there. A very sober look was on his face and she realized in an instant what it meant. 

“I can’t,” she said, blushing.

He looked crestfallen. “Are you religious? Is that why you won’t go to bed with me?” 

She laughed and blushed deeper. “No, not at all. I’ve—oh, this is embarrassing—I’ve got my monthlies.”

“Oh,” he said. 

“I want to,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She wound her hand around his and brought it to her lips so she could kiss his knuckles. For the first time, she noticed that the index finger of his right hand was missing the first joint and there was a small protrusion at the tip. “What happened?” she said, touching it.

Buster withdrew his hand like he’d been burnt. “Clothes wringer when I was a tot,” he said.

“You’re self-conscious about it,” she said, comprehension dawning. “I’m sorry.” She gently took his hand again and kissed each fingertip individually, including the shortened one. His nails were bitten down and she wondered fleetingly about all the things she didn’t know about him. “I think it’s beautiful, just like the rest of you.” She looked at him and he swallowed. “I’m sorry about … having my monthlies too.”

“I said no apologizing,” he said, clearing his throat. 

“I did want to, that night at your party,” Nelly said, pressing his hand. “And when I didn’t hear from you, I figured I was just there for a little fun.”

Buster returned the press of her hand. “You weren’t.” He cleared his throat again. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

“Okay.” 

They lapsed into silence and she could hear Buster thinking as he stroked her hand. 

“Are you hungry? I could make some sandwiches.”

“No, I uh—” He scratched his head with his other hand, seeming nervous. “I better go.”

Nelly’s heart sank. She had done something to offend him. Maybe it was mentioning his finger. Or her monthly visitor. Perhaps he thought she was making excuses. “Did I say something?” she said. 

“No. I just think if I stay here any longer, I’ll—” He laughed and didn’t finish his thought. 

“What?” she said. She kissed his hand in concern. 

“I might be compelled to do something rash, monthlies or no monthlies.” His laughter trailed off and he gave her a meaningful look. 

“Oh.” Monthlies or no monthlies, a lick of fire went through her. “I should see you out.” She stood before he had a chance to test his powers of persuasion and the fire had a chance to catch. If he really did mean to take her to bed, she didn’t want it to be this way, her makeup half-gone, the redcoats downstairs. “I’m glad you came. I feel better.”

Buster stood and put a hand in the center of her back. “Any time. Don’t worry too bad, you’ll get your break. And hey, maybe the picture will flop without you in it, ever think of that?” The hand slipped down to her waist and they walked slowly to her door.

“With Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks?” she said, smiling. “Not likely.”

“You never know,” he said. They went out the door and walked down the hall together, Buster still gripping her waist.

“Thanks again,” she said, as they reached the front door of the apartment. 

Buster kept hold of her waist. “Same day, same time next week?” he said.

“What, here?” she said, her heart speeding up. 

He kissed her forehead. “If the invitation stands.”

“Of course.” She hugged him, burying her face against the side of his neck where he smelled like aftershave and Buster. Her heart was beating so hard she thought she might swoon. 

Buster squeezed her back. “I’ll give you a call next week, okay? Keep your chin up.” 

With a parting kiss to her lips, he stepped into the night. She watched him until he got into his car and pulled away, then returned to her apartment. She didn’t think it was possible for her to feel in any more of a muddle. On the whole, though, Buster had made it a much more pleasant muddle.

It was a cool fifty-eight degrees the morning of the 26th. There was the sign, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer-Stvdios, the gate that swung open to admit him, the attendant in the booth that waved him onto his destiny. As Buster parked his car in front of the offices, he reflected that anyone else in his place would have a song in their heart right now, what with the weekly $3,000 and twenty-five percent cut of profits that were soon to be his. Nothing sung in him. He couldn’t shake the image of a prisoner walking to the gallows as he entered the building. 

Mayer’s office was wood-panelled and working hard, Buster saw, to convey taste and refinement. Mayer had a soft, persuasive voice with a hint of a Russian accent, and it was with this voice that he told Buster how honored he was that Mr. Keaton had chosen to sign with them, and hoped that his time with the studio would be productive and successful. Irving Thalberg, also in the room, expressed similar wishes. Other men whose names he was told and promptly forgot shook his hand and said it was an honor. Professions were made that if he should need anything,  _ anything _ , he should never hesitate to call upon them. Buster nodded and answered in kind. The whole scene felt stiffly rehearsed and he never had cared for rehearsals. He felt like he was watching himself on the screen.

Harold Lloyd’s words went through his head.  _ It’s not your gang. You’ll lose _ . 

But there was the contract set out on a little desk like a bone for a dog, and there was the Villa to think of, the Villa wouldn’t pay for itself. There were his boys, his Little Lord Fauntleroys. There was Natalie too, he had to keep her in the way in which she had become accustomed, and he also had Myra and the other Keatons to support. 

The bone seemed too easy, there had to be some catch, some dog-catcher’s trap he wasn’t seeing. He picked up the fountain pen with the gold bib and mother-of-pearl inlays on the barrel. Giving his audience a slight smile, he unearthed the final page of the contract and signed. There was no need to read the pages before; he’d been given a copy by Joe beforehand and seen all the herebys, herewiths, hold harmlesses, and ‘it is understoods and agreeds.’

Someone clapped his shoulders and he had the fight the urge to sock them one good for touching him. He didn’t know these stuffed shirts from Adam, but he shook hands agreeably instead. It then transpired that they wanted to snap some pictures of him outside the gates, so away he went, the pliable new star that they had collected for their luminous pantheon. 

It was understand and agreed, he thought, standing there with a suitcase in one hand and oversized leather satchel in another, that Buster should herewith pose with some bags that had been plastered with stickers that read GAGS, the reason being that they would convey to the public that he was moving into M-G-M and bringing his gags (haha!) with him. He wanted a cigarette, but then there came headshots, and after all wasn’t it an honor for the photographer to be shooting him? The photographer said so, anyway. 

Honor. Everyone kept using that word. It made it sound like he was doing them a favor out of the goodness of his heart, rather than being forced into it.

When every excruciating formality had been taken care of, he shook another round of hands and was released. The tour of the studios had occurred a few weeks before and all that needed to happen now was for his new picture to be settled on. Mayer assured him that they would be in touch about it. 

As he drove away and headed back to Beverly Hills, cigarette in mouth, he felt like doing something reckless and destructive, but nothing suggested itself. Drinking himself into a stupor was too obvious and easy. He wanted to burn something down, beat someone up, anything to tarnish the squeaky-clean reputation he knew that Louis Mayer wanted him to have. He thought of surprising Nelly with a visit, but since it had only been two days since he saw her, her feminine predicament was likely to be the same. He wished Roscoe were in town and that they could paint the town red like they used to. Then he felt guilty, knowing that old Roscoe would give his right arm for a chance like he was getting. In a dialogue in his head, he apologized to Roscoe and explained that everything had changed since those early, innocent days. Things weren’t what they used to be. Hollywood was growing up. 

_ It’s not your gang _ . 

Well, what was done was done. There was no turning back now. 

_ You’ll lose _ . 

When the familiar streets and buildings of Beverly Hills came into view, he finally figured out what he was going to do. He was going to have an affair. In the years since his exile from Natalie’s bed, he’d had plenty of trysts. He was known to a brothel or two, and he’d also had a couple of steadies, girls with their own places he could depend on to scratch the itch when he got it, but he’d never had a real affair. He knew the perfect place to start it, too. He pulled into the parking lot of Luxury Travel and stretched his legs. 

The receptionist pretended not to be awed when she saw him. “What can I do for you, Mr. Keaton?” she said, as though they’d met before. 

“I’d like to see a man about a cabin,” he said. “A cabin by a lake.”

“Of course. Let me go get Mr. Cabbot.” 

In Mr. Cabbot’s office, Buster reiterated his desire for a cabin by a lake, within an easy drive, and Mr. Cabbot said he’d see what they had. Together, they agreed that a place just northeast of the San Fernando Valley fit the bill. Buster arranged to rent it Friday through Sunday. When Natalie asked him what he was whistling about when he returned to the Villa, he told her he was happy about the M-G-M contract, but he was thinking about next week, having Nelly all to himself in a cabin by a lake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buster signed the MGM contract on January 26th, 1928. I’d love to know what he was really feeling that day, but I can only speculate via this story.
> 
> I’ve had amazing moments of serendipity writing this story (which has turned out to be far longer than I would have ever expected). For example, when I decided casually back in the beginning that Nelly’s dream was starring in a talkie of _The Taming of the Shrew_ , I had no idea--scout’s honor--that there was a version of the film starring Pickford and Fairbanks and that it was the first adaption of Shakespeare into talking pictures. It was released in 1929, but filming probably would have been in the fall of 1928. How crazy is that? More serendipity presented itself when I found out that Sam Taylor directed Nelly’s crush Barrymore in Taylor’s previous film. The choice of Barrymore as Nelly’s love interest was also arbitrary, but it worked out perfectly.
> 
> I think the fiction has also let me get to know Buster better than before, and I think I must be immersed in his character well. Case in point: When I considered where Buster would take a girl he liked if starting an affair with her, an outdoorsy location with plenty of humble living struck me as appropriate. I’ve been slowly reading Rudi Blesh’s bio of Buster while writing this fic and was completely bowled over to learn that Buster’s honeymoon with Eleanor Norris Keaton consisted of a station wagon trip to June Lake. Cross my heart, I had completed Chapter 18 before reading that!
> 
> Anyway, writing this fiction has been fun and the serendipity has made it more so, and I hope you’re enjoying it. Do leave a comment if you are.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here you have it! The promised Naughty Chapter. The rating of the story has now been changed to Explicit from Mature. ;)

Nelly had all weekend to think over the fact that she was going to have a tryst with Buster Keaton, but now that she was sitting in his Lincoln town car with him watching the brown mountains and sandstone hills roll by, it scarcely seemed real. Over the weekend, she’d plotted out a dinner menu for his visit on Thursday and planned to wear the black silk lace chiffon chemise beneath her dress. She hadn’t expected the postcard that arrived at the beginning of the week, addressed to ‘Nellie Dean’ with a color image of the Villa on the front.

_ I’ll be by Friday instead of Thursday. Pack for three days. Will pick you up at 10 _ , it read in neat cursive. It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be.

So her plans were out the window. It was still a tryst, but not a one-night stand. It was some other category altogether that she couldn’t quite puzzle out. Buster would take her to bed undoubtedly, but there would be many other hours between now and Sunday to fill—not that she minded spending 72 hours in bed with Buster if it came to that. He was currently looking quite fetching in a tweed driving cap and a casual jacket to match. He chain-smoked as he drove and she wondered if he was nervous. He didn’t say much and she, feeling shy knowing what the trip was really about, couldn’t think of anything to fill the silence. 

After they had been quietly sitting for almost half an hour, Nelly thought of a topic of conversation at last. “What’s your real name?” she said. 

Buster looked over at her, raising an eyebrow. “What’s  _ your _ real name?”

She laughed. “Helen Gladys Foster at your service.”

“Ah, like Helen of Troy. The face that sank a thousand ships!” said Buster.

“Don’t you mean ‘launched?’ ” she said. 

“No, I said what I meant,” he said, deadpan. 

“Buster,” she admonished. 

“Not that I’m saying your puss would sink a thousand ships. Maybe three, tops.”

“If you weren’t driving, I’d strike you,” she said, laughing. 

“If I wasn’t driving, I’d letcha.”

When they fell silent again, she said, “You never answered the question.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Joseph Frank Keaton, but I’ve never been called anything but Buster.” He took the pack of Camels out of his trouser pocket and withdrew another cigarette.

“Houdini named you,” she said, recalling the piece of trivia from a magazine. It was a handsome name, Joseph, but she had to agree that Buster suited him ten times better.

“That’s right,” said Buster. He used his knees to steer the car as he lit the cigarette. It would have seemed dangerous with anyone else, but Nelly trusted his uncanny mastery of machines and his own body. “Fell down some stairs at six months and Harry says to my folks, ‘That’s quite a buster your boy took.’ They say I didn’t holler or anything. Didn’t have a scratch on me.”

“It almost sounds like a Greek legend when you tell it that way,” she said. 

“I’m Number Five in a long line of Joseph Keatons,” he said. “My oldest kid is Number Six, but Nate wouldn’t let me call him Joe or Buster. Said he was to be James or Jimmy. She put him in pink ribbons the first three months of his life too, poor sap. Wanted a girl and wouldn’t face facts for a while.”

Nelly was jarred back into reality with the mention of Natalie and his son. It was well enough to enjoy Buster’s company and admire how handsome he was, but he had a family and a life back in Beverly Hills at the end of the day. It made her feel funny and maybe a little blue. “It must be difficult to have to have to compromise like that,” she said diplomatically. 

Buster took a drag on the cigarette. “You ever been married?”

“Me?” said Nelly. “No, I’m an old maid.”

“Yeah, you’re appallingly old,” said Buster. “Twenty, by the looks of it.”

“Twenty-six. Twenty-seven in May, but you’re sweet to pretend,” she said.

Buster glanced over at her, looking surprised. “Are you really that old?”

“Yes, I’m really that old,” she said, feeling self-conscious.

“And no fellow’s ever thought to marry you, huh?”

“I had a boyfriend who proposed. I broke it off,” Nelly said. “Actually, he was named Joe, funny enough. I liked him okay, but I couldn’t see myself settling down with him. I was twenty-one. Mother was beside herself.”

Buster tapped his cigarette on the windowsill, ashing it. “So she wants you hitched, but you’re not having it, huh?”

Nelly laughed, feeling shy. “Oh, Mother wants me married alright. My little sister got married at nineteen and Mother never lets me forget it. ‘I was married and had you and Ruthie when I was your age. Ruthie has two children already.’ That’s what I’m always hearing. And now Ruthie’s going to have another baby any day now, so I really look bad.”

“Ma said the same thing to me when I was about your age. When she was twenty-five, she was already married, had me. Same story your mom’s giving. I guess it did get me to thinking about settling down,” Buster said. He took a contemplative drag from the cigarette and flicked it away. “You never answered the question, either. You’re not interested in marriage?”

Nelly felt a warm pleasure that he seemed so interested in her thoughts on matrimony. “If I found the right fellow, maybe,” she said. “I know it’s what’s expected. I just always thought of my career first. Home-making seems so dull once you’ve been on the stage, to have to give it up to have babies and bake pies, you know.”

“I like pies,” Buster volunteered.

Nelly laughed. “I’d rather memorize lines or read a book.”

“Ma did both,” said Buster. “She married Pop and had me and then Jingles and Louise, but she was always part of the act until I broke it up. ‘Course she didn’t learn to cook until I was older, so there you have it. Guess something has to go by the wayside.”

“Jingles?” said Nelly. 

“My kid brother. Harry Houdini again. When he was a baby, he made such a racket with his toys the name stuck. Pop tried to get him in on the act, but it never really worked.”

Buster spent the rest of the ride telling her about his days on the vaudeville circuit with The Three Keatons. He had stories about almost suffocating in a trunk when he was a baby, fleeing burning buildings, appearing uninvited in Annette Kellerman’s act and stealing the show, and before Nelly knew it the last twenty-five minutes of the journey were up and Buster was turning off the car. As he’d talked, the car had moved up the sandstone hills and the sparse trees had gotten thicker until they were a real forest. 

Buster had stopped the car in front of a small, single-story brown-shingle cabin with an open porch. The cabin was at one end of the lake, which wound through the hills and out of sight like a river. With the windows still down, Nelly could hear a delicious stillness. The only sound was the echoing calls of birds high up in the trees. 

“It’s gorgeous,” she said in wonder. 

“Like it?” said Buster.

“I love it. I had no idea where we were going. I didn’t expect this.”

“Good,” he said. He looked pleased. “I’ll take our stuff inside, you can get out and look around.”

_ Our stuff _ . The words rang in Nelly’s head in a pleasant way. She stepped out of the car as Buster went around to the rear seats and looked up at the high trees with the sun shining through. So this was the site that Buster had chosen for their tryst. Not only was it beautiful, it was isolated; they had passed maybe two or three other houses that she’d noticed, and they’d all been miles back. Their cabin was located on a winding, private lane that terminated once it reached the house. She found herself wondering what Buster had told his wife about where he was going.

What a situation for her to be in! Her mother would be scandalized. 

There was a dock stretching several yards into the lake and Nelly walked to its tip, the structure swaying slightly under her feet. If she stood and looked straight out, she couldn’t see the dock at all, not even in her peripheral vision. It was like she was standing in the middle of the rippling water with the sunlight glinting off of it. Unfortunately, the effect was disorienting and she had to look down at her shoes to shake it off. She was hot by now and the water looked inviting. It had been cool when she and Buster had departed, and she’d chosen a wool dress and a light coat for the journey, but now the temperature had climbed, to seventy she guessed, and the thought of cool water on her skin was tempting.

A door banged and she turned to watch Buster coming out of the cabin. He set his hat on the hood of the car and walked toward her. The dock dipped slightly under his weight when he stepped onto it. When he reached her, he put his arm around her shoulders. Her body lit up at his touch. 

“Like the view?” he said. 

“Yes,” she said. It felt like the words had been stolen from her throat. There was a difference in being touched by him when they weren’t uninhibited by drink or she wasn’t in the throes of an emotional turmoil. She’d felt bold when he’d left her apartment last Thursday, but now she felt shyer. He was a Somebody and she was a Nobody or, if not a Nobody, then an Anybody. “It’s hot,” she observed, making small talk. “I could almost take a swim.”

“Great idea,” said Buster. “I’ll join you.”

She laughed, some of the shyness dissolving. “It’s February. I bet the water is freezing.”

“Bet you it ain’t.” Buster sat down on the deck and began unlacing his shoes. She was taken aback, but remembered back to what Bert had said the day that the facade scene was filmed, how you couldn’t change Buster’s mind once it was made up. 

“I bet you it’s colder than the Atlantic the night the  _ Titanic _ went down,” she said. She was very hot, though. She shrugged out of her coat and dropped it behind her on the deck, feeling only slightly cooler once it had been discarded. Buster set his shoes aside and rolled up his trousers to unhook his sock garters. “You’re crazy,” she said. But she liked the idea of him jumping into a cold lake in only his underthings.

“You’re coming with,” he said, reaching over and grasping her calf. 

She stepped out of his reach before he could do something dastardly like pull her in. “I’ll only consider it if it’s warm enough. You go first.”

“Sure,” he said, winking. 

She didn’t like the look of that wink. She watched him shrug off his jacket, unbutton his collared shirt, and place both in a heap with his garters and socks. Then he grasped the edges of his undershirt and hauled it over his head. She hadn’t been expecting him to go bare-chested and looked away, her cheeks flushing. His back was extremely muscular and she thought wildly that she would have to get rid of this shyness before he took her to bed lest she just lay there in a disappointing paralysis. Buster stood up and she had to look quickly away again; he was undoing his belt and his trousers. The sun suddenly seemed twice as hot as it had a few seconds before. She glanced back again, only to see his entire backside exposed as he shucked down his trousers, underwear and all. 

“Buster!” she said, closing her eyes. 

She heard him laugh, then the dock took a noticeable dip as he jumped. There was a splash and a yell, of exhilaration or shock at the water’s temperature, she didn’t know. 

“Are you decent?” she called. He could undoubtedly see how red her cheeks were because she could still hear him laughing. 

“As long as you’re not shocked by the sight of a fella’s shoulders,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, opening her eyes.

He was bobbing a few feet from the dock and she couldn’t remember ever seeing him grin so wide. He smoothed his wet lank hair out of his eyes with two hands. “It’s fine in here. A little cold, but it ain’t bad.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Would I lie?” 

“Yes,” she said flatly.

“Well I’m not. You’ll feel a lot better if you get out of that hot dress.”

“That’s just what a man who wants to get me out of my dress would say.” She shifted from foot to foot, deciding. 

“I’ve never been so offended by an accusation in my life,” Buster said, bobbing. 

“Oh hush.” She reached behind her neck to start working on her buttons. Buster kept his gaze on her and she blushed again. “Don’t get too excited,” she cautioned. “My chemise is staying on.” Her shyness flared as she finished unbuttoning the dress and stepped out of it, keenly aware of her quiet audience. She sat down and unbuckled her shoes, not looking at him, and unhooked her own garters and rolled down her stockings, now especially not looking at him. The air was cool against her skin and she was starting to have doubts about the water. 

“Jump in all at once,” Buster suggested. “You’ll get used to it faster that way.”

“I don’t know,” she said, standing up and looking down at the water with doubt.

“Come on, don’t be a chicken.”

“Oh, you think I’m a chicken?” she said. He seemed to know exactly the right way to goad her. Of course she would want to impress him by being daring. 

“Prove me wrong,” he said, with a defiant look on his face.

“Okay,” she said, steeling herself. 

“And lose the chemise!”

Her face heated. “Buster …”

“It’s only fair,” he said, deadpan and innocent. 

Her heart thumped. Would she really dare? She thought about it. “You have to turn your back if I do,” she said, testing him. 

Buster looked as though Christmas had arrived. He spun right around. “Alright.”

“No peeking,” she warned. Feeling like she was positively mad, she unbuttoned the straps of her step-in chemise and slid it down her body, keeping an untrusting eye on Buster the whole time. 

“All at once, you hear?” he called. 

“I am, but you keep your back turned!”

“I’ll count you off,” he said. “Five, four—”

“Start again and go slower.” She crept up to the edge of the dock so her toes were overlapping the edge. Figuring that he’d try to sneak a peek as soon as the countdown was up, she decided to take the plunge on the count of four. 

Buster sighed in mock exasperation. “Five. Four—”

Nelly jumped. And screamed as she hit the water. 

Not only was it not warm, it was not ‘a little cold’ as Buster had claimed. It was not even a lot cold. It was the coldest water she’d ever felt in her life. It was freezing. She thought blindly of the  _ Titanic _ as she pulled her sopping head above water and gasped. Her muscles had launched into a violent shiver. She dashed the water from her eyes and opened them. 

Buster was roaring with laughter. 

“You son-of-a-bitch!” she said, when she could speak.

He swam to her, shuddering helplessly as he laughed. She did what was only deserving. She jumped half out of the water and pressed both hands down on the crown of his head, dunking him. 

He came up laughing. He shook the water from his hair and seized her around the waist. “Dunk me again,” he said, pecking her cheek and grinning. “I got to see your tits.”   
  
“Buster!” Her shock was only half-pretend. 

“Sorry, I’ll say bubs from now on. How’s bubs?”

“I can’t believe you,” she said. She could feel that her cheeks were hot even though her teeth were chattering.

Naked in a lake with Buster Keaton was not how she had expected to end up five minutes ago, let alone that morning. As Buster held her waist, she brought her arms up and put them around his neck. Her chest made contact with his and he looked down for a few long seconds, then back up at her. “You’re cold,” he observed pointedly. 

They both remained quiet for a few moments, treading water. Her heart was drumming very fast and the frigid water now seemed quite remote. She was already shivering less. 

“Suppose we go warm up,” Buster said. “Unless you’re still keen on a swim.”

“Okay,” she said. Her voice felt like it would fail if she said anything more. 

He leaned in to kiss her and his lower half bumped hers, confirming her suspicion that he had something on his mind besides swimming. “C’mon,” he said. He let go of her waist and drew her arms from his neck. She followed him over to the dock ladder and he got out first. She was too shy to look at him as he exited the water, though she’d liked the earlier glimpse she’d gotten of his backside and was tempted. She trained her eyes on his knees when she climbed out. She was less enthusiastic about him seeing her in the nude; she had never forgotten his words about the size of her bosom or how she was too heavy for pictures. As she stood up, one look at the awed expression on his face told her that the worry was misplaced.

The air was cold on her wet skin and she shivered anew, but both of them had, it seemed, run out of jokes about the water and the temperature. Buster took her hand and they walked barefoot up the dock and into the dusty soil, their feet picking up dirt.

They stepped inside the cabin. It consisted of one open room with a kitchen area, a dining table with two chairs, and a sitting area. A small hall led to what she presumed was the washroom. There was a double bed against the south wall, just opposite the door. Buster led her to it and pressed on her shoulders, making her sit. She watched in dry-mouthed anticipation as he crouched and rummaged through one of his suitcases. This time, she didn’t look away from the sight of his muscular back and bare backside as he crouched on his haunches, looking for what, she didn’t know. They were both still wet, her hair in particular dripping in its chignon, but she scarcely noticed. When Buster straightened back up with a small, thin metal box in his hand, it became apparent: prophylactics. Foolishly, she hadn’t thought about bringing any herself. She was grateful for his foresight. 

Buster sat next to her and without a shred of shyness took a prophylactic out of the tin and put it on. She watched his face as he did, feeling in a daze. Knowing what came next, she drew her legs onto the bed and stretched herself out in the center. Buster climbed on top of her and touched her cheek, looking into her eyes. She was struck by how beautiful his eyes were with their brown irises and delicate black fringe of upper lashes. He gave her a deep kiss.

“You sure?” he said, he said in a soft voice.

She nodded and reached down, grasping him. He closed his eyes and drew in a sharp breath. He couldn’t tell yet, but her body was just as much affected as his. She shifted her hips, positioned him, and he pushed. There was no need to tell him to go slow, for he was the perfect size for her and she was at the pinnacle of excitement. 

“Nelly,” he whispered, closing his eyes and exhaling heavily.

“Go on,” she said, kissing him.

He began to move in languid strokes, holding himself up with one arm and palming one of her breasts with his free hand. 

She clutched that muscular back, transfixed by the well-sculpted muscles of his shoulders and pectorals, the dark thick hair on his forearms, and the way his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. In contrast to his arms, there was barely any hair on his chest and torso. The pleasure of him inside her was exquisite and she kissed his throat, moaning. That made him quicken his pace, and if slow had been good, fast was even better. 

He touched her all over, moving his hand from one breast to the other, trailing his fingertips over her stomach, and following the contours of her sides. They were both breathing fast. Nelly put a finger to his lips and he moved it out of the way to kiss her wetly and messily, his teeth bumping hers. He was moving even faster now and a sweat had broken out on his back. He dropped to his forearms and kissed her neck, pushing deeper. She felt that she could last the rest of the day, but she wasn’t sure about Buster. She could feel the increase in his desire in the tension of his muscles and see it in the set of his jaw. A low, continuous hum of pleasure was coming from his throat.

“You can let go if you want,” she said, kissing his ear and laughing a little.

Buster didn’t need to be asked twice. He groaned and snapped his hips forward. She was caught off-guard in the most delightful way as he drove into her at such a furious pace, the bed lurched. She closed her eyes, savoring the feel of him. When he cried out and the rhythm broke, she knew it was over. “Sweetheart,” he said throatily. He gave two more jerky thrusts and collapsed on her, kissing her neck.

She held him close as he recovered, his breathing hard. It had been a long while since she’d been with a man and she felt very good indeed. After several seconds, Buster slipped out of her and grabbed her arms, heaving her on top of him as he rolled onto his back. He knit his arms around her waist and they regarded one another. 

“How was it?” he said.

“Wonderful,” she said, smiling and stroking the still damp hair at his temple. 

“You sure?” he said, expression serious. “You were laughing just a second ago.”

She laughed again. She couldn’t help it. “I laughed because I was enjoying myself. Are you always this insecure when you take a girl to bed?”

“A fellow’s never sure what a lady thinks of his performance,” he said, looking somber. 

Nelly kissed his cheek. “Well it was first-rate. I want an encore later.”

He looked pleased. “Far be it from me to refuse a lady,” he said, brushing her cheek.

“Good.” She brought her head down to his chest, listening to his heartbeat as they lay there in silence. 

He stroked her head. “You chilly?”

“A little.”

“We’d better get into some clothes before we catch cold.” He sat up and she shifted off of him to a sitting position. “Not,” he added, looking her up and down, “that this is a bad look for you. You should try it out more this weekend.”

“Only if you try out yours,” she said, looking down at him and smirking.

Buster used the washroom and she took her turn after him. He was back in underclothes by the time she returned. She got into a bandeau brassiere and cami knickers as Buster put on a pair of trousers and buttoned up a light knit long-sleeved shirt. 

“I like that you don’t wear a girdle,” he said.

Her cheeks flushed a little. “Well, would you like to wear one?”

He laughed. “Kinda question is that?”

“Precisely,” she said. “They’re a nightmare! Your lungs get squished to the size of pea pods. I used to be more vain about my figure, but I won’t have anything to do with them now.”

“I was just thinking it was nice because I can see this better.” He trailed a finger down the midpoint of her torso to her navel. “This too.” He traced the curve of her waist down to her hips with both hands and she lit up with desire again. 

“Is that so?” she said in a breezy way, trying to act unaffected.

“Uh-huh.” He pulled her close and kissed her square on the mouth. 

“We’ll catch cold,” she said feebly.

“Oh.” He pulled back and winked at her. “Okay.”

She opened her suitcase and pulled out a medium-weight grey chambray dress. It wasn’t particularly showy, but she had packed it for comfort. In the washroom again, she fixed her hair and makeup, which were not as not as worse for the wear as she expected given her recent activities with Buster. She did have to wipe dirt from her bare feet before putting on her stockings. 

“You look gorgeous, kid,” Buster said, when she’d reemerged. He kissed her. “Come help me put away the provisions.”

She slipped on her Oxfords with the low heel and joined him in the kitchen. There was a refrigerator, but the idea of there being an ice man anywhere nearby to make it functional was a laugh. Buster had thought this far ahead, though, because everything she helped him pull out of the brown paper sacks was fine without refrigeration: butter, eggs, potatoes, oranges, apples, carrots, cured ham and bacon, jars of chipped beef, mustard, bread, flour, beans, powdered milk, honey, maple syrup, peanut butter, and much more.

“You thought of everything,” she said. 

“Caruthers thought of everything,” Buster said, setting the maple syrup and milk in a cabinet.

“Who?” 

“My butler. Real name’s Willie, but he wanted something fancier so I called him Caruthers.”

“Oh, I forgot that was his name. He drove me home after your party, remember? You know, I still can’t believe Buster Keaton has a butler,” she teased, pulling some asparagus out of one of the sacks. 

“You haven’t tasted his cooking,” said Butler. He opened the refrigerator and put the meat inside. “I like the finer things, I don’t make it a secret, I like having someone cook for me. But I like this too. This is the way it was in Muskegon.”

He launched into an account of summers in the lakeside Michigan town, how he spent them swimming, pulling pranks on visitors, and constructing elaborate inventions to get a fat neighbor out of bed in the mornings or shame uninvited guests who availed themselves of the neighbor’s outhouse. By then, the food had all been put away and they were both leaning against the counter. Nelly thought she could listen to him talk for hours.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “Get the lay of the land.”

“Alright,” she said. 

The dirt drive that they’d come in on narrowed to a walking trail where two could stand abreast. They followed it into the trees. There were towering pines and firs, tall spindly maples, and cypresses. The air smelled piny and fresh. 

“I spent all my life in Evanston,” Nelly said. “I’m still not used to the California scenery.” She looked up, still taken aback by the view. “There are forests nearby, you know, but nothing like this. It’s so flat that when we would go to the beach in the summer, we could look across Lake Michigan and see them building all the new skyscrapers in Chicago. The skyline was always changing.”

“That’s funny,” said Buster. “At Bluffton I’d walk to the beach and look out at Lake Michigan too. Thought it looked just like an ocean. Couldn’t see any skyscrapers where I was, though.”

Nelly had a romantic image of them, Buster in his teens maybe and she not more than twelve, gazing at the same inland sea on their respective shores, separated by a hundred miles as the crow flies, never knowing the other existed. It was like the beginning of a picture Buster might star in.

“I wonder if we ever looked at it at the same time, the lake.” 

Buster knit his hands behind his back as he walked. “Might’ve,” he said.

They walked in silence for a while.

“I wanted something like this when Nate and I got married,” said Buster out of the blue. “Something simple.”

“Oh?” said Nelly. She was surprised he was talking about his wife again. 

“Yeah, my big idea was to buy a farm down in the San Fernando Valley and lease it out to a farmer and his wife for about a year. They’d get it up to snuff, the cows, the crops, the chickens, the works, then we’d build a nice house there and live happily ever after.”

Nelly looked down at the path, which was becoming more stony. “What happened?”

Buster shrugged. As they walked, he fished a Camel out of the pack in his trousers pocket and lit it. “She had other ideas,” he said, after taking a drag off the cigarette. “We never could manage to get on the same page.”

She knew right away that he was telling her something that had been eating away at him for a long time. “That’s too bad,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“We rented a house for awhile, but then the baby was coming and her family insisted on moving in, so we rented a bigger place. Then we buy a house after the second kid comes along. Only that house ain’t the right one either, so we buy another and move again. I get the bright idea that I’ll build one for her. I help design it, think of everything down to the furniture. Takes months,” Buster continued. “Figured I’d surprise her. She’s gonna love it. Only she don’t. So okay, I get rid of it. Build her another house. Is she satisfied? I don’t know.”

“How couldn’t she be?” said Nelly, assuming that he was referring latterly to the Villa. “It’s paradise.” She didn’t want to offend Buster, but it seemed the peak of bad breeding to turn down a house that your husband built specially for you. 

“You don’t know Natalie. She may not be descended from royalty, but she sure acts like it.” He took a drag from the cigarette. 

“ _ And for thy maintenance commits his body / To painful labour both by sea and land, / To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, / Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; / And craves no other tribute at thy hands / But love, fair looks and true obedience; / Too little payment for so great a debt _ ,” she quoted. 

“What’s that mean?” said Buster. 

“Oh, it’s a line from Kate’s big speech at the end of  _ Taming of the Shrew _ . I just thought of it because of the—” She trailed off, not wanting to mention Natalie’s ingratitude. “Anyway, it means that husbands slave night and day to keep their wives comfortable and safe at home, and it’s not asking much for wives to be obedient and loving as thanks.”

Buster laughed. “You believe that?”

“I didn’t think I did,” she said. “If you ask me, Petruchio is a bully to Kate. But it does seem—” She stopped again. “I’m sorry, it’s not my place.”

Buster smiled and flicked some ash. It was not a happy smile. “You can say it. My wife’s an ungrateful you-know-what.”

Nelly’s cheeks heated. “It’s not my place,” she repeated. 

“No, it’s okay. I’m the one who brought it up. Guess it just gets under my skin sometimes.”

Nelly couldn’t fathom being unhappily married to handsome, successful, funny, rich, kind-hearted Buster Keaton. “I just thought any girl would be thrilled at the idea of making a home with you,” she said. 

“I thought so too,” said Buster, with another rueful smile.

She wanted to ask him more, but neither did she want to pry. “It fits better,” she said. “The farm, I mean. I guess I don’t know you all that well, but it seems to fit better.”

Buster took a long drag from the cigarette and appeared to be thinking. He kicked a stone. “No changing it now.” 

The reason for Buster bringing her here was coming into focus, though it still wasn’t all the way clear. She knew he wasn’t faithful to Natalie, which had shocked her when she first heard it back on the set of  _ Steamboat _ , but she’d never stopped to consider that there might be a reason for his philandering. Over half a year in Hollywood had taught her that most stars stepped out on their husbands or wives. It seemed just a matter of course.

“I don’t mean to drag you down,” said Buster. “Not much of a romantic getaway, hearing me complain about my marriage, huh?”

Nelly looked at the path ahead of them instead of at him. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I like that you trust me.”

Buster didn’t reply, but he halted to toss his cigarette and grind it underfoot. When he was done, he put an arm around her waist and she leaned her head on his shoulder, and they continued down the path at a slow, shuffling pace. In spite of the glum topic of conversation, Nelly couldn’t help but feel happy and bright. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope I didn’t build this chapter up too much and that it wasn’t a let-down! Please leave a comment and kudos if you liked it. Suggestions are welcome too.
> 
> A couple notes on research: Yes, they did have condoms (usually called prophylactics) back in the 1920s. They also did everything that we did in terms of sex acts. ;) I watched a couple short pornographic French films from the 1920s and was like, ‘Uh, yep. That’s the same alright.’ 
> 
> What we now call iceboxes were simply referred to as refrigerators. An iceman delivered a block of ice each week, which you’d put in the refrigerator to keep your food cool. Electric refrigerators weren’t very widespread in the late 1920s. Buster probably would have had a couple at the Villa, but there would not have been one at the cabin he shares with Nelly.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments for me telling me what you think--I’m kind of in the real-life Buster’s quandary right now where I’ve made up the ending, but not the middle! I have ideas for a few scenes, but if you’d like to see Buster and Nelly in certain situations (sexual or non-sexual) or have any ideas, please share them!

When they were back from their walk, Nelly made cheese sandwiches on buttered bread. They spread a spare blanket at the edge of the lake to eat the sandwiches and drink lemonade. After they were done, Buster gave her a crash course in how to tie knots and cast a line. She insisted she’d never fished before and expressed relief that they were using cheese as bait instead of worms.

All of Buster’s worries about the weekend disappeared as they sat side-by-side at the edge of the lake, watching their lines as they talked. On the drive to the cabin, he’d been anxious. Suppose she wasn’t the outdoors type and would have preferred a hotel and fancy dinners instead of a cabin and cooking in? Suppose she didn’t really want to go all the way with him? Suppose they didn’t get on so well after all? All of his worries were for nothing. She proved as cheerful and easygoing as he could have wished. It felt as natural as anything to be with her. Contrary to what he’d expected, he didn’t feel a bit guilty about Natalie. He liked that he felt like himself around Nelly and not like a rajah in a palace. Of course, the fact that she genuinely enjoyed doing the deed made him like her all the more. It had been half the point of the trip, after all.

Nelly was squeamish and made him take the hooks out of the catfish, bluegills, and bass they threw back, but she was game to continue and started getting the hang of it when she caught their biggest trout yet. He tied the trout and walleye that were to be supper to a line in the water. They held hands or kissed when their lines were slack. She let him put his arms around her as much as he liked, which was a lot. He struggled to remember when the last time was that Natalie had permitted something like this. It seemed a very long time ago. He remembered holding her in bed at the end of a long day’s shoot at the Truckee River, chatting to her and stroking her stomach which was starting to expand with her pregnancy.

When they had more than enough trout and walleye to feed them, Buster took the fish up to the cabin and suspended them from a clothesline. Nelly, holding the folded blanket and dirty plates and watching the fish flap feebly, felt bad that they were suffocating, but when he explained the alternative was clubbing them she saw the wisdom in his solution. They’d only been fishing a few hours, but the sun was already getting low in the sky and the air was beginning to feel crisp. 

“You could make those butter cookies for dessert,” he suggested, following Nelly into the house.

“For you, anything,” she said, smiling and putting the dirty plates in the sink. 

Buster took the blanket from her and set it on a chair. It was such a funny choice of words, _For you, anything_. 

“How’s your nose?” said Nelly. She ran the sink tap and began scouring a plate with a sponge he hadn’t realized that Caruthers had packed.

“Sore if I bump it,” said Buster, “but it’s most of the way healed I guess. I’m just lucky it wasn’t my ankle again.”

“When did you break your ankle?” she said. 

He leaned back on the countertop. “Filming _The Electric House_. One of my slap shoes got caught in the motorized stairs and it snapped my ankle. I fainted dead away. Laid me up for months.”

“That sounds terrible. I would have baked you five pounds of butter cookies.”

He leaned over to kiss her cheek and she smiled again. 

“I don’t think I saw that one, _The Electric House_ ,” she said. 

“We started shooting it in ‘twenty, but my accident put the kibosh on it. Fred Gabourie—he’s my technical man—wouldn’t let me have a crack at it again until he’d rebuilt that infernal staircase. We shot it again in ‘twenty-two.”

“What’s a technical man?” She handed him a plate and added, “Dry this.”

He fished a towel out of a drawer and obeyed. “I dream it up, Fred builds it. He was the one who helped me work out the breakaway house on _Steamboat_. They’re letting him come over to M-G-M with me and thank God.”

“What’s M-G-M like?” asked Nelly.

Buster grimaced. “Don’t know yet. Just signed the contract last week.” He put the plate away and she handed him another to dry.

“You made a face. Aren’t you glad?”

Buster hesitated. She was trying hard to make it in pictures and would probably think he was crazy if he told her the truth. He’d already taken a risk opening up to her about Natalie. He didn’t want to think badly of him. He wavered too long, though.

“You’re not glad about it,” Nelly concluded. She handed him a butter knife to dry.“Why?”

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he said cautiously, drying the knife and setting it aside.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mr. Mayer,” she said. She took the towel from him and wiped her hands on it. 

“It feels an awful lot like I’m giving it all up,” he said. “When I had my own company, we never stuck to a schedule or wrote anything down, we just made it up as we went along. Almost all of my best gags came that way. I’m afraid I’ll suffocate like all our fish out there at M-G-M. They’re giving me two dozen writers, the best minds Nick Schenck tells me, but I never had any trouble with my imagination before, did I? When we got stuck, we’d just play some baseball ‘til we got it figured out. Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd are taking my part. They think it’s suicide. I went out to New York to see if I could get Adolph Zukor to put out my films, but it’s no good. M-G-M’s got me blacklisted. I snooped in his stuff when he was in the can and saw the letter. I’m property as far as they’re concerned.”

Nelly nodded, leaning against the counter with him. 

“I suppose that sounds ungrateful, huh? With you trying so hard to get a break.”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t see it that way.”  
  
He worried a fingernail with his teeth. “You don’t think I’m unreasonable?”

“Only when you let houses fall on you. No more of that.” She smiled. 

Buster thought back to that Sunday afternoon and the reckless despair he’d felt standing in front of the facade. “That was the morning after Joe told me I’d lost my studio, Joe Schenck,” he said. “I was crazy or I never would have done it. I didn’t care if it killed me or not. Didn’t see the point in going on,” 

Nelly put her arms around him and hugged him, her head on his shoulder. “Buster, don’t you ever think like that again.” She kissed his neck.

He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on her head. Her hair smelled like the lake and he thought of the way her nipples had pressed into his chest when they’d embraced in the water. “Okay.”

“Good.”

“Say, when do you want that encore?” he said. A certain part of him was beginning to awaken against her hip. 

She laughed. “Let me do some cooking or we won’t eat tonight!” She ducked out of his arms. “C’mere, you can help.” 

As reluctant as he was, he was also hungry and had to agree she had a point, so he obediently beat together some butter and sugar for her. She added pinches of salt and vanilla, then tipped in two egg yolks from the shell. After he’d mixed in the flour, he helped her roll the dough into little balls and press them on the cookie sheet.

When the cookies were in the oven and Nelly had begun washing potatoes for their main course, he took a platter and a knife outside. He gutted and cleaned the fish on the edge of the dock, putting aside his and Nelly’s discarded clothes so he wouldn’t get fish guts on them. He dropped the entrails, fins, and heads in the water.

Nelly blanched when he walked back in with the platter of slightly bloody trout and walleye. “Your hands!” she said.

He’d rinsed his hands in the lake, but his fingertips were still stained. “Boy, you’re more of a city kid than I thought.”

She took the platter from him. “You’ve got me there. Meat comes from the butcher’s and I don’t have to get my hands dirty for it.”

The cookies were by now cooling on a sill and there were diced potatoes sizzling in a pan. Nelly snapped the ends off stalks of asparagus. 

“Here,” said Buster, after he’d rinsed the fish and washed his hands. “I’ll teach you the real way to fry fish.”

She watched as he took out a tin of klim and shook some of the powdered milk into a bowl, adding water and stirring until the liquid looked like the real thing. He threw in a couple eggs, a handful of flour, a dash of salt and pepper, then rinsed the fillets under the tap. One by one, the fish got baths in the flour mixture, then rolled in a separate bowl of cornmeal. He scooped out two big spoonfuls of lard into a fry pan and melted the fat until it was crackling, and demonstrated how to lay the fish carefully into the spitting grease. Nelly regarded the proceedings with a serious air and stirred the potatoes. She put the asparagus in the oven to roast as he turned the fish. He could almost imagine he was back in Muskegon, but he hadn’t been grown up then and he never kissed pretty girls anywhere but the bedrooms at Delia’s. 

“Go set the table, I’ll take it from here,” he said, when Nelly declared the asparagus done and the potatoes nearly so.

He served them and, seated at the small table, they ate until they were stuffed. There was too much fish, so after they’d eaten their fill they walked to the edge of the dock and dumped the leftovers in the lake. Nelly wondered why they couldn’t just scrape them in the back of the cabin and Buster had to explain about bears. It was dark now, and Nelly gathered up their clothes from the dock.

“You afraid of bears?” he said, as they walked back to the cabin. 

“You trying to make me afraid of bears?” she said. 

He laughed, lighting a cigarette. “Ever seen one before?”

“Just at the zoo,” she said. 

“I’ve seen plenty. They’ll leave you alone mostly, but it’s best not to tempt them.”

“Thanks. You’re the only animal I’d prefer to be tempting this weekend.”

Buster tapped her behind playfully with his free hand. The night was cool and getting cooler. “Why don’t you go get the blanket and our jackets?” he said.

With Nelly thus occupied, he returned to the Lincoln and pulled his ukulele case from the backseat. He took a few more drags from the cigarette before grinding it out and joining Nelly outside the cabin. 

“Where to?” she said. 

“Hmm.” He scanned around them, looking for a good break in the trees. He decided on the east side of the cabin, which was relatively treeless. At his instruction, Nelly spread the blanket on the ground and they sat on it. The sky couldn’t have been clearer, a million white stars scattered across it. It was the perfect end to a perfect day. No wonder he felt like singing.

She handed him his jacket. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The light out in Evanston and Chicago, it just wipes out the stars. You never see them this bright unless you drive far out of the city,” said Nelly. “I still don’t think they’re this bright though.”

He opened the case and got out his uke. As Nelly lay back, her arms crossed behind her head, he strummed the opening chord to “Red Wing.”

_Charlie Chaplin went to France_

_To teach the ladies how to dance_

_First you heel and then you toe_

_Lift your skirts and up you go_

Nelly laughed, and Buster stopped to tune the fourth string before going into the chorus.

_Now the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin_

_His boots are cracking for want of blacking_

_And his old dusty coat is wanting mending_

_Until they send him to the Dardenelles_

He made a pillow of his jacket and lay down, singing and watching the stars. When he was done, Nelly said, “Were you in the war?”

“Yeah, Sunshine Division, but by the time we got to France, it was pretty much over. Never saw any action.”

“No war wounds?” she teased, running her hand over his bicep.

“Just my hearing. I caught a cold the first month I was over there and had it so long I went deaf. Almost got shot and killed ‘cause of it. I was coming back from playing cards one night and I didn’t hear the sentry asking for the password. He cocks his gun and somehow I hear it just before he pulls the trigger. Tell him not to shoot, it’s just me. He bawled me out good for it.”

Nelly leaned over and ran a finger over the rim of his ear.

“Now any time I've got a cold I go deaf, more or less,” he said, as Nelly kissed his ear. He shivered, distracted. 

“What did you do if you didn’t fight?” she said, lying back.

“Slept on the ground and caught my death of a cold,” he said, strumming a few chords.

“Anything else?”

“Do that ear thing again, will you?”

“Only if you give me a story,” she said coquettishly. She wriggled closer until they were lying side by side.

“Didn’t do much. After the Armistice then sent us to a little town by Bordeaux, all of us crammed in these boxcars they called forty-and-eights. I scrounged food for us. We were all half-starved from army chow. The girls in the shops took a shine to me.”

He told her some of the highlights, getting the general’s orderly to drive him to the town square in the general’s car so he could put the fear of God into his fellow troops, doing the snake dance for a brigadier general, and the endless cigarettes, games of cards, and fooling around. 

“What a life you’ve led!” she said, laying an arm across his chest.

“ _K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy_ ,” he sang. “ _You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore. When the m-m-m-moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door_.”

“Mmm.” He glanced over to see her with her eyes closed and a smile on her face. 

“Don’t fall asleep on me now,” he said. 

“I’m not. Just listening.”

“ _K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy. It’s plain to see y-y-y-you’re a perfect bore_ . _If it’s a-a-a-all the same to you Katy, I’d rather go off t-t-t-to war_.”

Nelly giggled. “I don’t remember those words.”

“I made them up,” Buster said.

“How ‘bout an encore?” she said. 

He strummed another chord, ready to launch into “Baby Face” for his next number. Nelly gently removed the ukulele from his hands and set it on the ground a couple feet away. “Uh-uh,” she said. “The other kind.” She peeled off her jacket and climbed on top of him. His heartbeat quickened.

“How could I forget?” he said, running his hands up and down her arms. 

“Liar. You haven’t forgotten a thing.” She bent down and her mouth was by his ear again. She sucked his earlobe and he groaned involuntarily. He sought out one of her breasts and fondled it. He kissed her. She kissed back and rolled her hips against his. He _mmm_ ed appreciatively. He wasn’t sure how long they kissed like that, her head framed against the stars each time she pulled back, but it got heated awfully quickly. 

He reached under her skirt to do battle with her knickers. There were a lot of things he liked about women, but getting them out of their complicated clothing wasn’t one; he wasn’t even going to try to mess with her dress. Nelly helped him, moving off of him for a few moments and slipping the article of clothing off one shapely leg. He put his hands back under her skirt and squeezed her bare bottom. She was sitting on top of him again by now, fussing with the buttons to his trousers. 

“Here, let me,” he said. 

She stroked him, which distracted him so much that unbuttoning his own trousers took three times as long as normal. Finally he shimmied out of them while she worked to unbutton his drawers, and then they were both unclothed enough to start something. 

“Wait, wait. Almost forgot.” He groped for his trousers and felt in the pocket where he’d placed the tin of prophylactics earlier, having a good sense after the lake ordeal that that mood might strike anywhere. He took one out and put it on. “You may start,” he said. 

“You’re too ridiculous,” she said, leaning over and giving him a deep kiss, but she was smiling. She reached down, maneuvered him, and he was inside her in seconds. “Goodness Buster,” she whimpered, and that set him all afire.

He shoved up into her with abandon, clutching her backside and gritting his teeth at the sensation. “You feel great,” he told her. 

“You’re not … so bad … yourself—oh!” she said.

“I thought I was ridiculous?”

She had no answer for him, not with words, anyway, but to his delight she took control from him and set her own rhythm. He held her thighs and watched. It was too dark to see much of her, but the light from within the cabin allowed him glimpses of the ecstasy on her face. She pressed his hands down by his head, palms up, and threaded her fingers through his as she rode him. He clenched his teeth and tried to distract himself by looking at the stars. He didn’t want to lose it yet.

Nelly kissed him, her lips soft and intoxicating. “Are you going to come?” she asked sweetly. 

“You just had to go and say something, didn’t you?” he managed to choke out. Unable to hold back any longer, he grabbed her hips, pushing up and into his orgasm. It hit in such exquisite bursts that he wasn’t sensible again for several long moments. When he came back down, Nelly had rolled off of him and slung an arm over his chest. She sighed in a happy way. 

He put his arm around her and kissed her head. “You’re something else, you know that?”

“Buster,” she said, voice dreamy.  
  
“Mmm-hmm?” he said.

She made no reply, but nuzzled her head into his shoulder. They lay there like that in silence for several minutes. He was the most content he’d been in a good long while. Only a stinging on his bare thigh brought him back to reality. He slapped it and said, “Suppose we head back inside before the bugs eat us alive?”

He stood up and redressed, and Nelly pulled her knickers back on and folded up the blanket. She yawned. “I’m ready for bed.”

He put an arm around her waist and they went inside. The kitchen was a mess, but Nelly didn’t mention it. She paused by the counter to pick up a cookie and pop it in his mouth. 

“That time I baked cookies for you,” she said, brushing crumbs from the corner of his mouth as he chewed. “It’s strange to think of.”

He swallowed the cookie. “Oh yeah?” 

She shook her head and gave a bashful smile, and he recollected that was how she’d been those first few weeks on the set: shy. “I still can’t believe you want anything to do with me after the way I behaved after the blind tiger.”

He shrugged. “You were in a spot, I got you out of it. I’ve seen dames do worse.”

She fed him another cookie. “I still don’t remember much from that night. Just waking up and losing my lunch and you holding my hair back. That was very nice of you.”

“I took you up to my room so you could sober up some, but you were a little worse off than I’d planned,” he said, his mouth full. “Decided not to take you home ‘cause I didn’t want you to throw up in my car. Plus you couldn’t remember your address.”

“Did you take advantage of me?” She cocked an eyebrow, but he could tell the question was playful. 

“If making you eat some toast was taking advantage, I’m guilty,” he said. “I recall you were stubborn about it. You wouldn’t let go of the thing I said about your weight, so I picked you clean up to show you weren’t heavy. Said I wasn’t gonna set you down until you ate something for me.”

Nelly laughed. “I don’t remember that at all! See? I have terrible manners.”

“No worse than mine,” he said. “You remember what I thought when you walked in my dressing room that first time? When I put two and two together, I could have kicked myself. Felt like the world's biggest oaf.”

Nelly bit into a cookie and stroked his cheek. “Well look where we ended up. Maybe you weren’t wrong after all. Anyhow, I’m still grateful for you rescuing me that night. For being a gentleman. I know you didn’t take advantage.”

“I think we can call it even,” he said, pulling her close to him and kissing her forehead. She yawned, leaning her head on his shoulder. “It’s time to get you to bed, too.”

“I still have to take down my hair,” she groaned, pulling back and setting down her half-eaten cookie. “I keep swearing that I’ll cut it, but I always lose my nerve.”

“Don’t. I like it. You look just like a Gibson girl. It’s pretty.” He stroked one side of her chignon. 

“It’s an inconvenience, but I’m glad you like it,” she said. She left his arms and sat on the side of the bed, pulling out unseen bobby pins and setting them on the end table. 

He felt a little shy himself now. It had been awhile since he’d stayed overnight with a girl and there was usually a lot more liquor involved and a lot less worrying about bedtime routines. 

“Will you find my hairbrush? It should be right on top in my suitcase.”

Buster located it and handed it to her. He watched, as he’d watched the night in his hotel room, as tendrils of long hair fell to her shoulders. It fascinated him now just as much as it had then. She looked up and gave him a sheepish smile, and he realized he was staring. 

“I’ll just go and take my own hair down now,” he said, pointing toward the washroom. He gathered his kit bag and had a piss before scrubbing his face and brushing his teeth. 

When he emerged, Nelly was brushing out her hair in long strokes.

“How’s it look?” he said, turning his head this way and that so she could get a look at his hair. 

She giggled and rumpled a hand through his hair as he bent his head for her to inspect. “First-rate.”

“Good.” He went to his suitcase and fished for a pair of pajamas. “No looking,” he warned her.

“I’d never dream of it,” said Nelly with a smile, looking straight at him as he began unbuttoning his shirt. 

He stripped down to his skivvies and put on the pajamas, and true to her word she watched his every move. He didn’t mind. 

She finished brushing her hair. He sat on the bed and watched her remove a small reticule from her suitcase and pull out two white ribbons. She sat beside him and nimbly braided each side of her hair, capping each braid off with a ribbon. 

“What a production!” he said.

“Now you see why I’m tempted to cut it.”

“Takes a lot of work to be a girl.”

“More than you’d ever know,” she said with a rueful smile. “I’ll just be a moment.” She disappeared into the washroom. 

He stood up and yawned. There was a window next to the bed and he cracked it. The cabin’s two radiators were working overtime and it was a little too warm in the big room. He sat on the bed again and fidgeted. His nervousness was increasing, so he lit a cigarette and smoked it all the way down before Nelly reentered the room. With the braids and now wearing no makeup, she looked girlish, but still pretty. He ground the cigarette into an ashtray on the end table as she sat on the bed, her back turned toward him. “I’ll let you help with the buttons,” she said. “It’ll go faster.”

He could smell mint Colgate on her breath and kissed the back of her neck. “You got it, sweetheart.” The act of undoing each tiny button was more intimate than he’d bargained for, not a turn-on necessarily, but he wondered if he really knew what he was getting into after all. 

Nelly stood and shed the dress. She was back in the brassiere and cami knickers, and damned if he didn’t go hard again. He watched in silence as she bent to unlace her shoes and extract a pale pink slip from the suitcase. She turned her back to him again as she unhooked the brassiere, took it off, and pulled the slip over her head. It barely covered her derrière. 

“Which side do you usually sleep on?” she said.

“Huh?” he said. 

She turned around, trying to pull the slip lower. “Stop gawping,” she said, but she was smiling.

“What was the question?” he said, now intentionally playing dumb.

“Which side of the bed? I’ll take the other.”

“I usually sleep in the middle,” he answered, being honest.

“Oh, a bed hog,” she teased, folding her dress.

“Can’t hog the bed if you sleep alone,” he said. 

Nelly’s eyebrows knit momentarily. “Oh,” she said. He could tell she was trying to hide her surprise. 

He shrugged. “I got kicked out of the bedroom after the last kid came along. Never have figured out why.”

“I see,” she said. He could tell she was weighing her words. “Well how about I take the left and you take the right? If you end up in the middle, I won’t complain.”

They turned out the lights as a team and got into bed. The room was very dark. Buster cleared his throat. 

“Something the matter?” said Nelly. She scooted closer and made herself comfortable in the crook of his arm again. 

“No, no,” he said. 

“Relax,” she said. “I don’t snore.”

He tilted his chin down and kissed her forehead gratefully. She put an arm on his chest and dragged her fingers over his collarbone and the hollow of his throat in a sleepy way. 

“Thank you,” she said. Her breathing already sounded deeper. 

“For what?” he said. 

“For today.” She gave another deep yawn. 

Although she didn’t elaborate, he knew what she meant. It was odd, but he was already dreading having to say goodbye to her on Monday even though the whole weekend stretched ahead. They felt like peas in a pod. For several minutes after she fell asleep, he stared up at the ceiling. Through the open window, he could hear bullfrogs in the lake calling out to each other, asking to be loved in their own way. He played through the day’s events, watching them in his head like a reel of pictures, until he too grew drowsy and succumbed to sleep himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs that Buster sings are a parody version of “Red Wing"* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAAkrI-aaOE) and “K-K-K-Katy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAAkrI-aaOE). I have Buster making up his own chorus to “K-K-K-Katy”; he made up lyrics to songs quite often!
> 
> *Charlie Chaplin took a lot of shit for not enlisting in WWI and was reviled by folks on both sides of the pond.


End file.
